Cisco Middle East & Africa hosts ‘Future Cloud’ summit to showcase new hybrid cloud innovations

Cisco, led a MEA cloud summit showcasing new ways it is helping its customers and partners in the region accelerate digital transformations as they move more resources to the cloud. The hyper-connected, distributed world we live in today relies more than ever on cloud, and IT teams are facing challenges to provide optimal digital experiences wherever and whenever people need access. As a result, businesses are migrating to a cloud-driven operational model based on speed, insight, and control to bridge the greater distribution of applications, users, and tech staff.

Enabling customers realise better outcomes from the cloud

Cisco has made multi-billion-dollar investments over the past six years to build cloud into every aspect of its business, focusing on helping customers confidently develop complete cloud strategies across five key areas: continuity, insights, security, connectivity, and operations.

During the virtual event, the company showcased how it is advancing its cloud strategy across several of these areas to help businesses connect, secure, and automate to deliver seamless digital experiences in a hybrid cloud world.

“User experience is key to success in a digital world,” said Reem Asaad, vice president Cisco Middle East and Africa, “We are focused on empowering and enabling technology groups to securely deliver the best possible application experiences. Only Cisco can power the hybrid cloud solutions, observability, insights, and automation necessary to be truly cloud smart.”

New hybrid cloud solutions discussed:

The agenda was designed to address key issues customers face when building their cloud strategy. As Adele Trombetta, VP of CX EMEAR notes: ‘migrating to the cloud opens a whole new world of possibilities that promises cost optimisation, security improvement and stelar user experience. It is, however - even for the boldest, most tech-savvy among us - incredibly complex. The MEA Cloud Summit is a great opportunity to meet some of Cisco’s experts on Multicloud and hear from the people that help US design our strategy’.

Supported by Cisco Customer Experience (CX) services that offer:

- Business critical services for Cloud provide advisory services plus expertise to architect, deploy, secure, and optimize digital transformations.

- Intersight Workload Optimizer Services enhance the resource consumption of applications in the cloud.

- Advanced Services for ThousandEyes and SD-WAN deliver the best application experience for cloud solutions, providing expert design and integration to reduce project complexity and speed transformation.

- Custom Quick Start Solutions provide services for end-to-end automation and infrastructure-as-code (IaC).

Cisco believes that organisations want to see their multi-cloud solution manage applications, workflows, and data better than ever before - providing better user experience, assurance of compliance, decreased security risk, programmable infrastructure and Reduced OpEx.

Osama Al Zoubi, CTO, Cisco — Middle East and Africa, said: “’We are experiencing a rate of change that we have never seen before; this acceleration created tremendous challenge and presented new opportunities. The ability to navigate the new world through multi-cloud architecture and all the innovation associated with it, is the path that many major organizations are embracing. We invite you all to come and join us through the MEA Cloud Summit forum to discuss and collaborate on ideas that will enable and accelerate digital business."

Stephen Elliot, program vice president, I&O, cloud operations, and DevOps, IDC, said: "As organisations increasingly rely on cloud applications sitting in multiple clouds, operating these hybrid IT environments becomes overwhelmingly complex. IT teams must monitor and optimise application experiences, working alongside developers. IT executives should view Cisco’s latest hybrid cloud innovations as a bold effort to position the company as a cloud-neutral enabler for businesses and addressing customers' challenges by providing hybrid cloud solutions that help make it easier to execute their cloud strategies."

Tareq Amin, CTO, Rakuten Mobile, said: “Cisco has been a valuable partner in our launch of Rakuten Mobile's cloud-native mobile network in Japan. Leveraging Cisco’s high performance 100G and 400G Nexus cloud infrastructure, network automation and observability, we are driving towards our goals to not only deliver the best mobile connectivity experience for our customers in Japan, but also to telco, enterprise and public sector customers through the Rakuten Communications platform globally."

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