Riyadh – More than 25% of enterprises in Saudi Arabia have plans in place to deploy a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs. That's according to the latest findings revealed by IDC's annual Saudi Arabia CIO Survey, which also found that the three main obstacles to cloud rollouts in the Kingdom are insufficient migration capabilities, multi-cloud management challenges, and security concerns. The use of legacy applications and infrastructure, a lack of skills, and difficulties finding the right partners were also identified as key issues.

"As the reliance on multiple workloads hits a new high, accelerated by the global COVID-19 outbreak, IDC expects to see more and more organizations across the Kingdom embracing multi-cloud," says Hamza Naqshbandi, IDC's country manager for Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. "Uncertain market realities caused by the pandemic situation are forcing organizations to reevaluate their cybersecurity exposure as they pivot from a 'cloud-last' to a 'cloud-also' mindset. The most important aspect of this paradigm shift is going to be around how to stay responsive to customer needs, how to scale in a safe and secure manner, and how to facilitate the transition of work from an office desk to the home."

IDC also anticipates an increase in security spending as enforced working-from-home practices expose corporate networks and computing devices to new levels of cybersecurity risk. Securing the cloud workloads used to perform work-related tasks has become extremely important and a failure to do so poses a significant threat to the organization – operationally, financially, and reputationally.

"IDC believes the fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak will expose new security loopholes that cyber miscreants will exploit," says Naqshbandi. "As a result, data breaches are expected to become more widespread, exacerbated by the notoriously unsecure habits of remote workers. As such, enterprises need to be prepared to respond to any cyberattack, data breach, or privacy violation that may arise as they grapple with these new market realities, particularly as the criticality of ensuring digital trust continues to rise."