“The cloud has the chance to unlock Digital
Transformation in the Middle East,” said
Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services.
“We are launching advanced and secure
technology infrastructure that matches the
scale of our other AWS Regions around the
world and are already seeing strong demand
in the Middle East for AWS technologies like
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning,
data analytics, IoT and much more.
“We are excited to see how our cloud
technology will provide new ways for
governments to better engage with
citizens, for enterprises to innovate for
their next phase of growth, and for
entrepreneurs to build businesses and
compete on a global scale.”
The new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region
offers three Availability Zones at launch.
AWS Regions are composed of Availability
Zones, which each comprise of at least one
data centre and are located in separate and
distinct geographic locations with enough
distance to significantly reduce the risk of a
single event impacting business continuity,
yet near enough to provide low latency for
high availability applications.
Dr Werner Vogels,
CTO Amazon.com,
on stage discussing
AWS’s opening of the
Middle East region
With this launch, AWS now spans 69
Availability Zones within 22 geographic
regions around the world and has
announced plans for nine more Availability
Zones across three more AWS Regions
in Indonesia, Italy and South Africa.
Developers, start-ups and enterprises, as
well as government, education and non-
profit organisations can now run their
applications and serve end-users from data
centres located in the Middle East, as well as
leverage advanced technologies from AWS
cloud to drive innovation.
www.intelligentcio.com
Each Availability Zone has independent
power, cooling and physical security, and is
connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency
networks. AWS customers focused on high
availability can design their applications to
run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve
greater fault-tolerance. AWS infrastructure
regions meet the highest levels of security,
compliance and data protection.
Millions of active customers are using AWS
each month in over 190 countries around
the world, including tens of thousands of
“
business
‘‘
TALKING
WE WILL NOW BE
ABLE TO BENEFIT
FROM DATA
CENTRES WITH
LOWER LATENCY
IN THE REGION.
customers in the Middle East and North
Africa (MENA).
Enterprises across the region are moving to
AWS to become more agile and innovate,
and include Al Jouf Cement, Al Tayer Group,
Arab Banking Corporation (Bank ABC),
Aramex, Bahrain Bourse, Bank Al-Etihad,
Batelco, Emirates NBD, Flydubai, Gulf News,
Hassan Allam, Lulu International Exchange,
MBC Group, OSN, Seera Group, Union
Insurance and Virgin Middle East.
Careem, which operates in Kuwait, currently
hosts 33 million customers and one million
drivers on its platform and has expanded its
services to offer on demand deliveries as well
as its original core business of ride hailing.
Magnus Olsson, Chief Experience Officer
and co-founder of Careem, said: “When
we started building Careem, we knew that
the ability to scale fast, and in a secure and
reliable way, would be critical to our long-
term success.
“As one of AWS’s early adopters in the
region, we have grown with them. Thanks
to AWS, we have been able to focus
our efforts on geographical and new
vertical expansion and to innovate new
technologies and services.
“With the opening of the new AWS Middle
East Region, we will now be able to benefit
from data centres with lower latency in the
region. AWS’s commitment to our region
shows the enormous potential of the local
technology scene and will be instrumental
to the success of the new wave of start-ups
to come. We look forward to having them
as a strong contributor to the Middle East
tech ecosystem.” n
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