Growth projections of the MEA data storage market

The data storage market in the Middle East & Africa has been steadily growing, mainly driven by investments from telecom operators and financial institutions. However, the market is facing certain growth challenges brought about by heavy administrative constraints, lengthy decision making periods, unexpected delays, and a lack of visibility on the execution of pipeline projects. Additionally, there is an increasing traction towards converged infrastructure solutions, in which the vendors’ package servers, storage, software, networking and other data centre components into pre-configured solutions tailored to meet the needs of a particular enterprise.

Advancements in information and social technology have paved the way for unabated data growth in the MEA region

Business enterprises have now moved from compression techniques and duplication to data servers and rack servers to manage the development and growth of big data. However, there has been tremendous growth witnessed across business enterprises, and the currently available technologies are not adequate to meet the growing requirements of the enterprise. Therefore businesses are fast moving towards scale out architecture such as storage virtualisation and hyper converged infrastructure from traditional scale up architecture. This offers enterprises an improved and scalable platform solution that is cost effective and efficient. Also, an increasing demand for smartphones and other devices underpinned by the Internet of Things (IoT) along with a massive growth in social media channels has also increased the demand for additional storage, which is driving the growth in demand for advanced data storage solutions in MEA. 

“Cloud computing is a hassle-free and cost-effective data storage facility. Recently, NetApp Inc. reported that its revenue from cloud providers doubled from that in 2013. In addition, NetApp announced that globally over 200 cloud services were based on its technology. EMC Corporation is also targeting the cloud storage market aggressively. Cloud storage is expected to be a vital component of most enterprises in the near future.”

One more factor promoting the growth of the MEA data storage market is a constant decline in the prices of consumer storage devices such as HDD and SSD. The game changer for the consumer storage industry is the advancement of 3D NANO technology. Consequently, SSD capacities have increased, while its prices have declined. Increasing market presence of regional players is further cementing competition and in turn shrinking the average selling price of consumer storage devices. All these factors are driving revenue growth of the data storage market in MEA.

Increasing growth of the data storage market to be witnessed in the commercial sector

Africa is home to six of the top 10 fastest growing countries in the world. The data storage market in these emerging economies – specifically Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa – is expected to grow continuously at a high rate, mainly driven by long-term demands for data storage and the creation of new and advanced storage infrastructure. In terms of end use, the commercial sector is anticipated to witness significant demand for data storage in the MEA market. In 2017, the commercial sector accounted for about 73% market share of the GCC data storage market. In terms of revenue, the residential sector is projected to be the most attractive segment in the GCC data storage market during the forecast period while the commercial sector is expected to register high Y-o-Y growth rates throughout the period of study.