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Growing Public Cloud in the Middle East and North Africa

Hyperscale public cloud services offer agility, scalability and significant cost benefits that are difficult to achieve in traditional enterprise data centers. These services will serve a strategic role as the foundation for the digital business transformation of the future.

At the end of the third quarter of last year, Gartner is predicting a 13.5 percent growth in public cloud services for 2015. This growth is forecast to peak in 2016 and will likely stay constant through 2019, although the actual spend should increase through to 2019.

The public cloud computing market is maturing, across the globe. Public cloud services in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is forecast to grow by 19.3 percent in 2016 to reach a total of $880 million -- that's up from an estimated $737 million in 2015, according to the latest market study by Gartner.

Public Cloud Service Market Development

Moreover, Business Process as a Service (BPaaS), the largest segment of the cloud services market in MENA, is expected to grow by 7.3 percent year-over-year in 2016 to reach $266.2 million.

The largest growing market in the MENA region, cloud management and security services, is projected to grow 29.3 percent year-over-year in 2016. However, the demand for some cloud applications within the region may be somewhat inconsistent from country to country.

"The forecast for cloud services vary based on local factors, including supply and demand within the local markets, country-specific economic conditions, currency exchange rates, and other global market factors," said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.

Gartner believes that the reasons why the BPaaS market will be the largest in the MENA region during 2016 is testimony that enterprises in are moving away from traditional Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) models to a cloud based BPaaS model.

Furthermore, strong growth in the cloud management and security services segment in 2016 is an indicator that enterprise security continues to be a perceived inhibitor for cloud adoption in this region.

Regardless of these concerns, the market development outlook in MENA is upbeat. Gartner predicts that in 2019, total public cloud services spending in the MENA region will rise to $1.45 billion, with Software as a Service (SaaS) accounting for 22.6 percent of the market.

The ongoing adoption of SaaS in the region will be followed by Cloud Management and Security, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with projected year-over-year growth rates of 21 percent and 19 percent, respectively, in 2019.

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