The public cloud services market in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is projected to grow to 19.3 percent in 2016 to total $ 880 million, up from an estimated $737 million in 2015, according to Gartner, Inc. Business Process as a Service (BPaaS), the largest segment of the cloud services market in MENA, is expected to grow 7.3 percent year over year (YoY) in 2016 to reach $266.2 million. The largest growing market, cloud management and security services, is projected to grow 29.3 YoY percent in 2016.

 “The forecast for cloud services vary based on local factors, including supply and demand within the local markets, country-specific economic conditions, currency exchange rates, and other global market factors,” said Sid Nag, Research Director at Gartner. “The fact that the BPaaS market is the largest in the MENA region in 2016 is testimony that enterprises in MENA are moving away from traditional Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) models to a cloud based BPaaS model. The strong growth in the cloud management and security services in 2016 is an indicator that security continues to be a perceived inhibitor for cloud adoption in this region.”

Gartner predicts that in 2019, total public cloud services spending in the MENA region will rise to $1.45 billion, with Software as a Service (SaaS) accounting for 22.6 percent of the market, followed by Cloud Management and Security, and Infrastructure as a Service  (IaaS) with projected YoY growth rates of 21 percent and 19 percent in 2019.