intelligent INFRASTRUCTURE
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 AWS-designed 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 on-premises
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-inclass
robotic process automation, relying
on AWS’s leading cloud technology. We
are pleased to see the introduction of
AWS Outposts to Saudi Arabia.” ◊
www.intelligentdatacentres.com Issue 17
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