Dubai: Almost half of the small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with less than 250 employees in the UAE are keen to move to cloud computing for business purposes in the near future, said an industry official. [Cloud computing is a technology that lets you use files and applications over the internet.]
“SMBs are regarded as integral to a developed economy and play an essential role in employment generation. As SMBs don’t typically have dedicated IT personnel focusing on the information protection they need to keep them out of harm’s way, making them more susceptible to risks than enterprises, said Justin Doo, cloud and security practice director for Middle East and North Africa, Symantec Corp.
According to the Ministry of Foreign Trade more than 80 per cent of the private sector is comprised of SMBs in the UAE.
“We deliver products and services tailored specifically to SMBs to ensure they are protected so they can focus on what they do best — accelerate their businesses. We understand the SMB environment and the challenges they face,” said Doo.
According to a survey conducted by Symantec, 24/7 protection and time savings are strong motivation for SMBs to adopt IT cloud services to protect their businesses from external internet security threats and internal risks.
By adopting cloud services, he said, SMBs will be better enabled to protect their information while maintaining existing IT staff to focus on more productive, business critical activities.
According to the UAE Ministry of Economy, SMBs have become vital to the growth of the UAE economy, contributing 60 per cent of the national GDP in 2011.
The majority of the survey respondents are at least aware of cloud computing, and 52 per cent of small businesses correctly identified its meaning as data stored, secured and accessed remotely.
Almost 40 per cent of SMBs use cloud services for personal use, and more than a quarter of respondents use cloud services for business purposes, citing social networking sites as the top used cloud services while time savings from cloud services is a strong draw for adoption with 86 per cent of respondents likely to move to cloud if it meant saving a considerable amount of time on IT-related tasks .
Today’s sophisticated internet hackers see SMBs as a potential backdoor into the larger organisations.
“Today’s SMBs are four times more at risk of malware attacks than larger companies. Despite the risk, some just cross their fingers and wing it because buying, deploying and managing security systems are too complicated,” said Prajit Arakkal, Director - SMB & Distribution Sales - Emerging Markets.
“Building trust with a cloud provider is top of mind for small and medium businesses,” he said.
