Dubai, United Arab Emirates – Digital transformation has become a top priority in the agenda of senior executives across the Middle East. The region is home to a collective economic goal, spearheaded by governments, to digitally transform entire industries. The global Coronavirus pandemic only accelerated this trend, prompting entire businesses to shift to remote work overnight, while growing concerns about cybersecurity demand immediate attention to security and data protection. At the centre of these trends are cloud technologies, which are supporting secure, distributed work and enabling entirely new digital business models in industries like retail, manufacturing, health care and more.

A recent research study from Google Cloud and Alphabeta Inc estimates that in the top 10 MENA economies surveyed, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as much as US$600 billion in recurring value could be generated by 2030 through accelerated cloud adoption. And an astounding 79 per cent of that figure is driven by technologies that help businesses and workers adjust to changing conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Increasingly, companies in the region are partnering with Google Cloud to execute data-driven and secure digital transformations and to empower their distributed teams with cloud-native collaboration tools.

Building more data- and AI-driven businesses

Businesses working with Google Cloud are benefiting from enhanced real-time data and analytics, and leading innovation in applied AI and machine learning. Google BigQuery, for instance, gives businesses the opportunity to derive more value out of their data and create valuable business insights to understand their end users more deeply. For example, many global businesses have vast amounts of data stored in their core business systems, like finance systems powered by SAP. By bringing this data to Google Cloud, businesses can augment these SAP systems with new analytics and AI capabilities, often unearthing entirely new business insights. An IDC report released in 2021 stated the three year return on investment (ROI) of companies bringing their SAP data into BigQuery is 323 per cent, and that queries were completed 63 per cent faster.

Operating securely and flexibly

Security and data protection are among the most important concerns for global businesses, particularly following 2021’s Solarwinds incident, among many others. Google Cloud delivers end-to-end security, from the chip to the datacenter.  Our integrated approach to infrastructure security works cohesively across multiple layers: hardware infrastructure, service deployment, user identity, storage, internet communication, and operations security. We ensure every layer of technical capability is born secure, saving companies the time and investment that can be used to focus on their own products, services and customers.

Flexibility is another key concern for businesses, who don’t want to find themselves locked into a single vendor. The ability to easily work across multiple environments, including across on-premises and cloud infrastructure, or even across multiple clouds, is not only better for security, but enables choice and delivers maximum value for the customer. By working with a cloud provider like Google Cloud, who has fully embraced multi cloud approaches, customers can ensure they can run workloads, applications, and data analytics in the environment best for them.

Enabling sustainable growth

Businesses in the region are aligning their sustainability objectives to address and reduce their environmental impacts. Today, this not only includes reducing carbon outputs in fields like manufacturing or transport, but also ensuring that companies are running their core business systems in a sustainable manner. Google Cloud operates the industry’s cleanest cloud, enabling customers to deliver systems like SAP in a carbon-neutral manner and furthering sustainability objectives.

Rise with SAP Partnership

July of 2021 witnessed the launch of an expanded strategic partnership between Google Cloud and SAP, with SAP naming Google Cloud as a strategic cloud partner for its “RISE with SAP” initiative. The growing partnership is a testament to each organisation’s commitment to supporting customer success.

Paving the way for businesses to transform to intelligent enterprises, the strategic partnership enables customers to easily run SAP business critical workloads on Google Cloud, benefiting from a future-proof, secure and low latency environment. And while it is just the beginning, there is notable momentum for the two companies in the Middle East, with teams from SAP and Google Cloud working as one force fueling digital transformation for many of the region’s most successful businesses.