The 4th Annual KSA Cloud conference held in Riyadh, focused on security, infrastructure and regulations specific to the Middle East region and emphasised the importance of cloud computing to business success.

EMC Corporation, a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service, and its security division RSA were the main sponsors of the conference. It was attended by a senior EMC delegation, including Valentin Paniagua, consulting director, EMEA South, and Mark Tutton, sales manager, RSA, Saudi Arabia.

They discussed insights on the importance of cloud computing for customers and businesses and highlighted the essential impact of virtualisation adoption on improving operational efficiency, quality of services and business agility. 

EMC also openly shared its own journey as it moves from a physical to virtual IT infrastructure, and ultimately, to the private cloud, and how this journey helped the company in reducing costs and transforming IT services to greater business innovations and competitive advantages.

Commenting on the event, Zaher Haidar, regional pre-sales manager at EMC Turkey, Emerging Africa and Middle East said: “Legacy IT infrastructures suffer from a high-level of complexity coupled with a low-level of utilisation. Analysis shows that around three-quarters of our IT budgets are spent on maintaining existing hardware and software leaving only a small fraction to be spent on new service offerings.”

The process of virtualisation and cloud adoption has many benefits for businesses; it provides a greater level of flexibility, scalability, availability and savings, both economic and environmental.

EMC suggested following a pragmatic approach to deploying Cloud technologies. A Private Cloud model should be the first step onto the journey to the cloud. During this transformation, key enabling technologies such as Virtualisation and Federation help improving the efficiency and agility of data centres and is enabling companies to build the VDC (virtualised data centre.)  - TradeArabia News Service