EMC highlights cloud computing benefits in KSA

EMC Corporation, and its security division RSA, were the main sponsor of the 4th Annual KSA Cloud conference held in Riyadh from the 12^th to 13th of June. EMC took the opportunity to discuss and emphasized on the importance of cloud computing in businesses’ success. 

The 4th Annual KSA Cloud conference, focused on security, infrastructure and regulations specific to the Middle East region, and 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 virtualization 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 utilization. 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 virtualization and cloud adoption as 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 Virtualization and Federation help improving the efficiency and agility of data centers and is enabling companies to build the VDC (Virtualized Data Centre.) A phased approach should be adopted to get to a full Private Cloud environment: 

In a first phase, IT production applications are virtualized leading to improved efficiency and higher simplicity. This phase is characterized by lower costs of IT as compared to traditional IT.

In the second phase, Business product applications are virtualized leading to improved scalability and continuity. This phase is characterized by improved  Quality of Service as compared to traditional IT.

In the third phase, Standardization and Automation are the enablers for reaching IT-as-a-Service. This phase is characterized by high-level of IT agility enabling IT to be run as a business. 

During the conference, EMC presented Callaway golfing as a recent successful IT transformation, deploying EMC and VMWare solutions case study. An independent economic analysis of the Callaway Golf storage and landscape virtualization project was conducted by ASG, leveraging the Gartner advisory firm’s TCO model, the independent analysis quantified and qualified a ROI of 289 percent, meaning for every dollar invested in EMC and VMware solutions, Callaway Golf would save or earn $2.89, over a three year period. This included a 13 month payback-breakeven, showing the project would be self-funding in little over a year, and deliver over $1.8M in capital and operative expense savings.