At Intersec UAE 2026, Owais Mohammed, Regional Lead & Sales Director at Western Digital for the Middle East, Africa, Turkey, and the Indian Subcontinent, spoke to GEC Newswire on data sovereignty, AI-ready storage, and the growing strategic importance of data infrastructure.
1. Please describe your flagship products for physical security, storage, networking, and surveillance. What is the theme and focus for your participation at Intersec 2026 UAE?
First of all, we are kind of celebrating 10 years of our surveillance product, the Purple Drive.
We are also showcasing our entire portfolio when it comes to anything related to security, surveillance, and AI. For example, we are showcasing our UltraStar drives, our Purple lineup, our Red drives, and also our storage solutions here.
2.Why is data infrastructure now being viewed as a national security priority, especially as AI, surveillance, and smart systems scale across the region?
With data sovereignty now at the center of every government discussion, many governments want to retain data locally.
That is why this is more important now than ever. Also, with the new buzzword AI, everyone wants to be a part of it, and storage is the foundation of any AI infrastructure.
3. Compute dominates AI conversations, but storage does the heavy lifting. Why do HDDs still underpin hyperscale, security, and AI-driven data centres?
Yes, you rightly said it. Compute has always been in the spotlight, but of late, I think companies are realizing that storage has been undermined. It should no longer be thought of as an afterthought, but as a very critical part when provisioning resources for any data centre or AI-related initiatives.
4. How are AI workloads breaking traditional storage models, and what must enterprises rethink around performance, scale, and architecture?
If I understand your question correctly, companies must first understand their workloads. Accordingly, they should plan how much data they are going to generate, because if there is no HDD, there is no AI. Data is very critical for any AI project that an organization may want to undertake.
5 . Sustainability is now a board-level metric. How can data centres reduce power, cooling, and footprint while continuing to scale capacity?
Yes, we play a very important role when it comes to sustainability.
For example, if you need one petabyte of data and transition from our 26-terabyte drives to our 32-terabyte drives, you can save 18% in footprint space and 18% in power consumption. This provides a better total cost of ownership in terms of data storage investment.
6. Total Cost of Ownership is under sharper scrutiny than ever. What should CIOs and CISOs prioritise when evaluating storage investments today?
They should first evaluate their workloads. Storage should not be an afterthought, and they should focus on provisioning the right amount of resources when it comes to data storage.
7. In a data-saturated world, trust matters. Why do proven engineering, long-term reliability, and vendor accountability matter more now than ever?
People want to go back and look at historical data. Data is used for analytics, to understand consumer behavior, traffic management, and more. Today, everything generates data, and it is even more important than it was before.
