Middle East enterprises are shifting from a “cloud-first” rush to a “cloud-right” approach, embracing hybrid IT as a more balanced, strategic path. The future lies in intelligently blending cloud, on-prem, and edge capabilities to deliver flexibility, cost efficiency, and resilience.
Across the Middle East, cloud investment has surged over the past five years. Government digitalisation agendas, pandemic-driven acceleration, and the rise of AI workloads have all driven organisations to embrace public cloud services at speed. But the initial euphoria is now being tempered by experience. Today, chief information officers and IT leaders are revisiting early cloud decisions more pragmatically, shifting their focus from simply moving to the cloud to critically assessing whether everything should remain there.
Increasingly, businesses are choosing to balance cloud with on-prem or co-location infrastructure. This is particularly evident in government, finance, and healthcare sectors, where performance, sovereignty, and compliance are paramount. For these businesses, cloud repatriation is no longer taboo. It’s emerging as the smart strategy. Gartner forecasts that by 2027, 50% of critical enterprise applications will reside outside of centralised public cloud locations.
This doesn’t mean the cloud has failed—far from it. Instead, it shows a growing maturity in how cloud is adopted and where it’s best applied. The result? Hybrid IT is fast becoming the dominant model for digital transformation across the Middle East.
“Hybrid IT is not about choosing between cloud and on-prem—it’s about choosing what’s right for each workload, so technology serves the business, not the other way around.”
Sascha Giese, Global Tech Evangelist, Observability, SolarWinds
The Reality of Hybrid IT: Promise and Pressure
Hybrid IT offers the best of both worlds. IT leaders can run critical workloads in controlled environments while using cloud services for scale, flexibility, and innovation.
However, managing hybrid environments is no small task. The IT landscape has become increasingly distributed, with workloads spread across multiple cloud vendors, data centres, and edge locations. Every new deployment brings a new layer of complexity. For IT teams, this translates into longer troubleshooting cycles, blind spots in system performance, and mounting pressure to deliver seamless experiences with limited resources.
The Core Ingredients of a Scalable Hybrid IT Strategy
To overcome these challenges, and build a hybrid IT model that delivers long-term value, organisations need a solid foundation built around the three core principles of flexibility, cost efficiency, and intelligence.
Flexibility means having the freedom to choose the right environment for each workload. AI training or big data analytics projects may run more efficiently in the cloud, while transactional systems or latency-sensitive applications often perform better closer to home. For example, a government agency managing national ID services may need to host sensitive databases on-prem for sovereignty reasons, while still leveraging cloud-based analytics tools for service insights.
Cost efficiency is increasingly top of mind. Monthly cloud bills have ballooned for many Middle East enterprises, especially those dealing with unpredictable licensing fees or running high-throughput applications. Hybrid IT enables teams to right-size their infrastructure, using cloud where speed matters and self-hosted environments where performance and cost control are more critical.
Intelligence, particularly through AIOps, is what ties it all together. AIOps enables teams to analyse vast volumes of telemetry data, detect anomalies, automate responses, and keep services running smoothly without human intervention. For stretched IT teams, this kind of proactive capability is a game-changer.
Why Full-Stack Observability is Essential
To manage hybrid environments effectively, visibility is everything. That’s where full-stack observability comes in. It’s no longer enough to know that a server is up or that a database query is slow. You need to understand why, where the issue originated, and how it affects downstream systems.
Imagine a customer complaint about a mobile banking app crashing during login. In a hybrid setup, the login interface might be hosted in a public cloud for scalability, the identity verification process could rely on an on-premises database for compliance reasons, and the customer profile data might be pulled from a microservice running in a private cloud. Without full-stack observability, troubleshooting such an issue could take hours. With it, you can pinpoint the root cause in minutes and solve the problem before it impacts more users.
It’s clear then that observability spanning legacy systems, private infrastructure, public cloud services, and SaaS applications is essential to regaining control. It gives IT leaders the insights they need to optimise resources, identify risks, and chart a clear path forward.
Planning Your Hybrid IT Evolution
Of course, observability is only one piece of the puzzle. For hybrid IT to thrive, businesses need a structured plan that connects strategy with execution. This isn’t something that happens overnight. It requires a structured plan, grounded in operational realities and business goals.
Start by mapping out your current environment. Which workloads are driving costs? Which are mission-critical and require full control? For example, a utility provider’s billing system may need to stay on-prem for performance and regulatory reasons, but their customer portal might thrive in the cloud.
Next, evaluate the scalability limits of your current infrastructure. Are certain teams waiting weeks for new environments to be provisioned? Are monitoring tools struggling to keep up with growing data volumes?
Once you’ve identified the friction points, define success. That could mean reducing cloud spend by 15%, cutting incident response times in half, or improving customer-facing application performance by 20%. Clear goals will help you chase measurable outcomes.
Then, choose the right mix of technologies. Don’t be afraid to combine SaaS applications with traditional enterprise software and private cloud setups. A hybrid model allows you to build around your business, not the other way around. Adopting AIOps can be an accelerator here. It reduces the manual burden on your IT team and helps spot performance dips before they affect users. However, AIOps is only as effective as its visibility, so full-stack observability should be built into it from the start.
Finally, be ready to iterate. Hybrid IT isn’t a one-time deployment. It’s a living, evolving strategy. Regularly assess what’s working, what’s costing more than expected, and where your users are running into friction. Build a feedback loop that helps you adapt continuously as business needs change.
Hybrid Horizons
Hybrid IT is a technical configuration that reflects a region’s strategic maturity. For Middle East organisations pursuing digital excellence, the goal now is clear: build a flexible, intelligent infrastructure that delivers today, adapts tomorrow, and scales for what’s next.
With the right strategy, tools, and mindset, organisations can build an IT environment that is fit for today’s demands and ready to meet tomorrow’s opportunities head-on.
Profile of Sacha Giese:
Sascha Giese is an Observability Evangelist at SolarWinds. He holds various technical certifications, including being a Cisco® Certified Network Associate (CCNA®), Cisco Certified Design Associate (CCDA), Microsoft® Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA), VMware® Technical Sales Professional (VTSP), AWS® Certified Cloud Practitioner, and Network Performance Monitor and Server & Application Monitor SolarWinds Certified Professional® (SCP). Giese has more than 15 years of technical IT experience, four of which have been as a senior pre-sales engineer at SolarWinds. As a senior pre-sales engineer, he was responsible for product training SolarWinds channel partners and customers, regularly participated in the annual SolarWinds Partner Summit EMEA, and contributed to the company’s professional certification program, SolarWinds Certified Professional.
