Nearly two years after it set up a base in Bahrain, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has widened its footprint beyond the country and established AWS Region in the United Arab Emirates. The firm is looking to start services from the first half of next year.
The new AWS UAE Region will consist of three Availability Zones and become AWS’s second region in the Middle East, giving customers more choice and flexibility to leverage advanced cloud technologies and the ability to run their workloads and store data locally while serving end users with even lower latency.
“We’ve said from the beginning that we’ll keep investing in the Middle East to meet customer demands. With the upcoming AWS Region in the UAE, customers that have data residency requirements in the UAE can store their data locally, while benefiting from significantly lower latency across the UAE and the Middle East,” Vinod Krishnan, head of Middle East and North Africa, Amazon Web Services (AWS), told TRENDS.
AWS has been investing and expanding its presence in the UAE for many years. The company opened an office in Dubai in 2017 and has grown since then.
It has also launched two Amazon Edge locations in the UAE in 2018 to provide customers access to key services to improve end user experience, including faster content delivery and cybersecurity protection solutions. In 2018 the company launched AWS Direct Connect in the UAE, making it easy for customers to establish a dedicated private network connection between AWS and their data center, office, or colocation environment.
According to Krishnan, the new data centers in the UAE builds on AWS’s ongoing investment in the Middle East, giving customers more choice and flexibility.
“We have a long history of working with customers in the UAE, with many having used our services from the early days of AWS, including some of the region’s leading and most innovative enterprises and startup,” he added.
The Middle East holds many opportunities where cloud technology can be a key enabler: economies that are diversifying, a digitally native and predominantly young population, a budding startup community, and several industries that are looking to undertake digital transformation.
Cloud is the new normal, says Krishnan, who went on to add that every organization in the world has to keep transforming their business and the end-user experience to remain competitive.
At a time when so many industries are being disrupted, cloud has become a powerful tool for entrepreneurs and organizations to accelerate their pace of innovation to better serve their customers and achieve their strategic goals.
According to Krishnan there are many benefits for using cloud computing for organizations. “Organizations do not have to spend their capital on servers or data centers. They get to turn capital expense to variable expense, which is a huge advantage for organizations that simply do not want to tie capital to infrastructure.”
A company does not have to pay any upfront or entry fee. Customers only pay for what they consume and have the flexibility to choose the pricing model. Customers can scale both up and down, and not sit on unneeded, excess compute capacity with the cloud. Also, the cloud allows applications and businesses to seamlessly grow as quickly as is needed. When the customer no longer needs that capacity, they can shed it just as quickly.
Customers in the Middle East are accelerating their shift to the cloud, according to Krishnan. At a time when so many industries are being disrupted, the cloud has emerged as a strong tool for entrepreneurs and businesses to enhance their pace of innovation to better serve their consumers and achieve their strategic objectives.