Why Cloud Operations Are Struggling—and What Organisations in the MEA Region Are MissingBy: Raif Abou Diab, General Manager – South Gulf & Sub-Saharan Africa at NutanixMost organisations assume they have a cloud problem. In reality, the challenge is far m

Why Cloud Operations Are Struggling—and What Organisations in the MEA Region Are MissingBy: Raif Abou Diab, General Manager – South Gulf & Sub-Saharan Africa at NutanixMost organisations assume they have a cloud problem. In reality, the challenge is far more specific and far more persistent: cloud management. Infrastructure did not suddenly become unmanageable because enterprises embraced hybrid or multi-cloud strategies. The real issue emerged when environments evolved faster than the tools responsible for operating them. Over time, platforms multiplied, workloads dispersed across locations and accountability became fragmented. The long-promised “single pane of glass” quietly turned into a collection of disconnected views.What stands out is that control was not lost the moment organisations adopted hybrid or multi-cloud models. Control was lost when cloud management approaches stalled at partial, platform-specific visibility, despite the environment becoming increasingly interconnected.Seeing Everything Still Isn’t the Same as Being in ControlMost cloud management tools provide extensive visibility—dashboards, alerts, metrics and visualisations that explain what is happening across environments. That information is valuable, but only to a point.Operations teams quickly learn that visibility without context creates noise. Alerts arrive from multiple platforms, each offering a fragment of the truth. The real challenge is rarely identifying what is happening, but understanding what action to take and how quickly it needs to happen.This is where the concept of a “single pane of glass” often breaks down. In practice, it frequently means a unified view limited to a single vendor’s environment. As soon as workloads extend beyond that boundary or span locations, teams revert to switching between tools to piece together the full picture.A cloud management platform should do more than observe. It should respond when pressure builds, take action when thresholds are reached and give operations teams the time they need to resolve issues properly.Why Day-to-Day Operations Break Down Under PressureInfrastructure teams do not usually struggle with design—they struggle with time. They are expected to maintain stability, manage growth, control costs, enable new digital initiatives and respond to incidents, often all at once. In Middle East and Africa, this pressure is amplified by rapid digital transformation, regional expansion and the introduction of data-intensive workloads, including early AI initiatives, into already busy environments.When issues occur, they tend to surface at the worst possible moment—during critical business processes that cannot be paused.Payroll is a straightforward example. It runs periodically, consumes significant resources in a short window and must complete successfully. If it fails, the impact is immediate and highly visible across the organisation. In those moments, teams are not interested in architectural diagrams or long-term capacity tr