UAE SMEs Need High Performance Information Management by 2020 to Succeed in Digital Economy

Enterprises Need to Focus on 1.5 Percent of Highest-Value Data: IDC

Dubai, United Arab Emirates: UAE small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need to adopt high-performance information management over the next five years in order to succeed in the Digital Economy, industry experts announced today.

Nearly half (45 percent) of medium-sized enterprises globally used digital solutions to grow revenue by at least 10 percent in 2015, according to a recent IDC survey.

However, UAE enterprises face an exponentially-growing amount of data, with global data set to grow 10-fold to 44 zettabytes by 2020, when emerging markets like the UAE will comprise 60 percent of total data generated, according to a recent IDC report.

“The Digital Economy presents new opportunities for the UAE’s SMEs, but are often daunted by data’s size, diversity, and growth. By focusing on real-time management of high-value data, SMEs can gain new business models, diversified revenue, and efficient and intelligent operations,” said Andrew Calthorpe, CEO of IT consultancy Condo Protego.

Fewer than 1 percent of global enterprises have achieved the highest level of data management, which would focus on the 1.5 percent of highest-value data, reported IDC.

“UAE SMEs face increasing urgency to harness real-time information management to succeed in the Digital Economy. With 90 percent of the region’s enterprises being SMEs, they can use real-time insights once only available to large enterprises to optimize their IT and revenues,” added Andrew Calthorpe.

With real-time information management tools, SMEs can minimize the downtime of their mission-critical business applications, optimize their network and device performance, better plan and predict their maintenance and disaster recovery, and save energy costs.

Supporting real-time information management is EMC’s XtremIO flash storage solution, which can be scaled up as businesses grow, and supports hybrid and private clouds.

XtremIO can store six times more data than traditional systems, and can reduce costs by up to 80 percent over three years. Demonstrating the effectiveness of XtremIO, 65 percent of the Fortune 100 companies use it to future-proof their competitive edge.