The UAE’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs) need to adopt high-performance information management over the next five years in order to succeed in the digital economy, according to industry experts.

Nearly half (45 per cent) of medium-sized enterprises globally used digital solutions to grow revenue by at least 10 per cent in 2015, according to a recent survey by IDC, a leading market intelligence and advisory firm.

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 per cent of total data generated, according to a recent IDC report.

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

Andrew Calthorpe, CEO of IT consultancy Condo Protego, said: “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,” he said.

“UAE SMEs face increasing urgency to harness real-time information management to succeed in the digital economy. With 90 per cent 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,” he added.

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

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, it stated.

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