INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
AWS outposts now available in
UAE and Saudi Arabia
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
has announced the general
availability of AWS Outposts
in the United Arab Emirates
(UAE) and the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia (KSA).
AWS Outposts delivers fully managed
and configurable compute and
storage racks built with AWSdesigned
hardware that allow customers
to run compute and storage on-premises,
while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s
broad array of services in the cloud. AWS
Outposts brings native AWS services,
infrastructure and operating models to
virtually any data centre, co-location space
or on-premises facility. With AWS Outposts,
customers can use the same AWS APIs,
control plane, tools and hardware onpremises
as in the AWS cloud, to deliver a
truly consistent hybrid experience.
Customers in the UAE and KSA who have
workloads that require low latency access
to on-premises systems, local data
processing or local data storage can
benefit from AWS Outposts. These include
applications that may need to generate
near real time responses, to communicate
with other on-premises systems or
control on-site equipment (e.g. factory
floor equipment, health management
systems and retail point of sale systems).
Customers can also use AWS Outposts to
securely store and process customer data
in countries where there is no AWS region.
This is important for organisations in highly
regulated industries and countries with data
sovereignty requirements.
Andy Isherwood, Managing Director of
Amazon Web Services EMEA, said: “We are
pleased to bring AWS Outposts to the UAE
and KSA. Following the launch of the Middle
East region in Bahrain last year, customers
have been continually expanding their use
of AWS and have asked us to help them with
moving their most sensitive workloads to the
cloud. AWS Outposts helps them to achieve
this. It is also particularly beneficial for
customers in UAE and KSA with low latency
and local data processing requirements
as AWS Outposts seamlessly and securely
integrates with AWS Regions.”
Yuri Misnik, Group CTO of First Abu Dhabi
Bank, the largest bank in the United
Arab Emirates, said: “We look forward to
leveraging AWS Outposts to transform the
user experience for our banking customers.
AWS Outposts will become an important
part of FAB cloud strategy.
“It will offer FAB the hybrid cloud
infrastructure we need to build and deploy
modern containerised workloads and the
ability to benefit from AWS’s rapid pace of
innovation in the cloud while being able to
store and process data on-premises.”
Obeikan Investment Group (OIG), a
major manufacturing and digital solutions
company in Saudi Arabia, has relied on
AWS to develop SANED, the group’s first
end-to-end cloud-based Business Process
Outsourcing (BPO) platform for small and
medium enterprises, which is set to launch
in September.
Abdallah Obeikan, Group CEO of OIG,
said: “We designed SANED as a business
solution for finance, HR, supply chain and
manufacturing to eliminate the complexity
of traditional enterprise resource planning,
with seamless user experience and data
visualisation. SANED integrates data and
transactions using our best-in-class robotic
process automation, relying on AWS’s
leading cloud technology. We are pleased
to see the introduction of AWS Outposts to
Saudi Arabia.” •
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