- The Amazon Web Services (AWS)-the cloud giant has successfully facilitated the mark of foraying lately in the Middle East tertiary with the inauguration of three exclusive data centers in Bahrain.
- Touted as being the first of its kind in entire Middle Eastern tertiary, it offers cloud storage to regional organizations amid the growing demand; the company stated it recently in the previous month.
Andy Jassy, Chief Executive of AWS, stated that “The cloud platform has all chances to unlock the digital transformation in the Middle East.” Besides it, the company is also witnessing a “powerful demand in the Middle East” for the lead technological advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics.
The biggest cloud storage provider globally, AWS, counts Al Tayyar Travel Group, flydubai, Union Insurance, Careem, StarzPlay, Anghami and Sarwa as customers. However, they declined to disclose the investment made in the data centers.
According to Statista, the public cloud services market within the Middle East and North Africa tertiary is projected to be having a growth of $1.9 billion (Dh7.97bn), within 2020 doubled than what it was four years during 2016.
The cloud-based services are being embraced mainly by a growing number of enterprises – ranging from start-ups to government entities to family-owned conglomerates, etc. For all native enterprises, moving to a cloud-based system hosted by a specialized company proves cheaper than creating their infrastructure of servers, hardware and security networks.
For example, Bahrain’s data & eGovernment Authority (iGA) has managed to chop down its operational technology prices by up to 60 percent utilizing the cloud technology, whereas Jordan-based start-up Mawdoo3 – an internet Arabic content publisher – has successfully moved all its AI-based projects to the cloud platform.
“By December this year, they are going to have 30 percent of all 72 government entities migrated to AWS and within June 2020, they have a tendency to expect to have most government knowledge centers being closed up, permitting them to focus resources on various projects that profit their citizens,” stated by Mohammed Ali AlQaed, chief government of iGA, that is leading the Bahrain government’s migration to cloud services.
Without specifying the precise locations, AWS stated that its Bahrain data centers are primarily based at separate geographic sites with enough distance between them to considerably scale back the chance of any single event impacting business continuity.
In April, AWS additionally supplemented Arabic support to Amazon Polly, a service that turns accessible text into lifelike-sounding speech. Emirates NBD, Dubai’s largest investor by assets, is utilizing the Amazon Polly in its automated call center to boost client interactions by delivering natural-voice banking services.
Several international players are establishing knowledge centers within the Middle East. Germany’s SAP is that the favorite within the region with three centers, in Dubai, Riyadh and Dammam, that house servers for native cloud computing clients. Last month, Microsoft opened its first two knowledge centers within the UAE.
Relatively a smaller player, Alibaba Cloud – the cloud computing arm of the Chinese e-commerce big – opened its 1st regional knowledge center in the city in 2016. Still, within the cloud market, AWS – a subsidiary of online retail big Amazon – is that the dominant player, maintaining a market share lead over its rivals. Last week, AWS reported revenues of $8.38bn within the second quarter of this year -37 percent more than the previous year.
