EC News DeskAmazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, announced it plans to open an infrastructure region in the United Arab Emirates in the first half of 2022. The new AWS Middle East Region will consist of three Availability Zones and become AWS’s second region in the Middle East with the existing AWS Region in Bahrain, giving customers more choice and flexibility to leverage advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud.
Globally, AWS has 80 Availability Zones across 25 geographic regions, with plans to launch 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.
AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that leverage multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.
AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones and across multiple regions to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The addition of the AWS Middle East UAE Region will enable local customers with data residency requirements to store their data in the UAE while also providing even lower latency across the country. Organizations using this region will also be able to access advanced technologies from the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services to drive innovation including compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, machine learning, Internet of Things, mobile services and more.
The new AWS Middle East Region (UAE) Region will build upon AWS’s existing investment in the country, which includes two AWS Direct Connect locations and two Amazon CloudFront edge locations launched in 2018. AWS also continues to build teams of account managers, technical account managers, partner managers, systems engineers, solutions architects, professional services, and more roles to help customers of all sizes move to AWS. In addition to infrastructure, AWS continues to make investments in education initiatives, training, and start-up enablement programs to support the UAE’s digital transformation and economic development plans.
To foster entrepreneurship and the growth of new businesses in the UAE, AWS will be further expanding the AWS Activate program to support the UAE’s startups and SMBs. Through the AWS Training and Certification programs, AWS will also work with government entities to support the up-skilling and re-training of the workforce with the latest cloud computing training curriculum. For students and educators, AWS will provide higher education institutions and their educators with cloud computing courses to prepare students to pursue industry-recognized certifications and careers in cloud computing.
“We are excited to build on the great momentum of cloud adoption in the Middle East by providing more choice for customers in the UAE to run applications and store data locally,” said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure, AWS. “The new AWS Region supports the UAE’s focus on promoting technology innovation that has made it a thriving global hub for entrepreneurs, e-governments, and multi-national businesses. With the new region, organizations of all sizes will be able to innovate faster and serve end-users with even lower latency across the region.”
His Excellency Mohammed Ali Al Shorafa, Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development, said, “AWS’s expansion into the UAE is a testament to our rapidly growing innovation ecosystem that will benefit from access to the world’s leading cloud platform and its advanced technologies and solutions. Building on Abu Dhabi’s smart infrastructure and digital transformation, AWS’s investment will further enable innovators and companies with globally-relevant solutions to realize new opportunities in the UAE and beyond.”
His Excellency Dr. Tariq Bin Hendi, Director General of the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO), said, “We welcome the upcoming AWS Region, which will bring advanced cloud infrastructure to the UAE. This comes in line with our goal of attracting investments that boost technology capabilities. It is another example of the growing partnership between the public and private sectors in the emirate aimed to accelerate breakthroughs and advance large-scale digital transformation, strengthening Abu Dhabi’s position as a global hub for innovation. We look forward to collaborating with AWS across the knowledge economy, including education initiatives, cloud skills training, and startup enablement programs.”
Millions of active customers are using AWS each month in over 190 countries around the world, including tens of thousands of customers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Enterprises choose AWS to become more agile and innovative, and include Al Tayer Group, Aramex, AXA Gulf, Axiom Telecom, Emirates NBD, Flydubai, Gulf News, MBC Group, OSN, Seera Group, Virgin Middle East, and many more. MENA public sector organizations are using AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and better serve the citizens of the region.
They include the Communications and Information Technology Regulatory Authority of Kuwait (CITRA), Dubai Expo 2020, Egypt Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of Bahrain’s Ministries, Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University, University of Bahrain, and many more.
MENA startups building their businesses on top of AWS to scale rapidly and expand around the world include Alef Education, Anghami, Careem, Dubizzle, EKar, Fetchr, Haraj, Health at Hand, Maestro Pizza, Mawdoo3.com, Property Finder, Sarwa, Souqalmal, StarzPlay, and Yallacompare.
Middle East-based AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners also welcomed the news of the planned AWS Middle East (UAE) Region. The APN includes tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) around the world. AWS Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support.
APN SIs, ISVs, and consulting partners in the Middle East help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customers’ AWS environments. Examples of AWS Middle East Partners include Accenture, Deloitte, Bespin Global MEA, Citrus Consulting, Cloud4c, Crayon, Du, Etisalat, F5, Integra Technologies, Keplerworx, Palo Alto Networks, Rackspace, Redington, SAP, Splunk, TCS, Trend Micro, VMWare, Wipro, and Zero & One.
Deloitte is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and a strategic global systems integrator. Through a strategic collaboration, AWS and Deloitte empower customers to transform their business and innovate faster by combining AWS technologies with Deloitte’s deep industry experience.
