Gartner predicts that in 2018, total public cloud services spending in MENA region will rise to $1.5 billion, with SaaS accounting for 28.3 percent of the market.

“The Middle East and North Africa region has a solid foundation for growth, and despite headwinds in the global economy, we predict this growth scenario to play out through to 2018,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner.

By 2018, the public cloud services market in MENA will be segmented with business process as a service (BPaaS) cloud services making up 25.6 percent of the market, platform as a service (PaaS) at 7.4 percent, cloud management/security services totaling 10.6 percent, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) at 10.7 percent, and the remaining 17.4 percent coming from cloud advertising.

“SaaS will be one of the fastest growth segments in the public cloud services market through 2018 as organizations increase their use of more applications across more vertical industries, including banks, governments, education, healthcare and telecommunications sectors,” said Fred Ng, senior research analyst at Gartner.