MANAMA: Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), announced the opening of the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) 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. Starting today, developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations can run their applications and serve end-users from data centers located in the Middle East, as well as leverage advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud, to drive innovation.
The new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region adds to the infrastructure investments AWS has been making across the Middle East, to provide customers with advanced and secure cloud technologies. Today, AWS is also launching a new AWS Direct Connect location in Bahrain, which is the first to be operated by AWS, joining the two AWS Direct Connect locations and two Amazon CloudFront Edge locations in the UAE that launched in 2018. AWS Direct Connect makes it easy for customers to establish a dedicated private network connection between AWS and their data center, office, or colocation environment. Amazon CloudFront gives customers an improved experience for their end users, including faster content delivery and added cybersecurity protection.
To support the growth in cloud adoption across the region, AWS has made significant investments in education, training, and certification programs to help those interested in the latest cloud computing technologies, best practices, and architectures, to advance their technical skills and further support Middle East organizations in their digital transformation. AWS offers instructor-led training programs for customers and partners, as well as general public training events such as AWS Summits, AWSome Days, Immersion Days, and Game Days as well as over 500 free online training courses. To help drive diversity in the tech industry, AWS has also extended its global ‘We Power Tech’ program to the region, providing events and free training courses to support technology skills development for women in the Middle East.
“Emirates NBD has been collaborating with AWS and taking advantage of AWS’s technologies and innovation practices to develop personalized, real-time banking experiences. The new AWS Middle East Region will allow us to further experiment and enhance our solutions as we continue to realize our vision of being the region’s most innovative financial services organization that is making banking more easy and intuitive for customers,” Abdulla Qassem, Group Chief Operating Officer, Emirates NBD said.
Well established family businesses in the Middle East are also moving to AWS to become more agile and innovate. Saudi Arabia’s Abdul Latif Jameel is one of the most respected family-owned businesses across the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, and over 30 countries worldwide, with diversified interests in major sectors including transportation, energy and environmental services, financial services, land and real estate, and many other industries.
“We welcome the opening of the AWS Middle East Region and see it as a real opportunity to bring more efficiency and innovation to our business, in a secure way. We started our AWS journey with Abdul Latif Jameel Commercial Development Company, in Jeddah, by migrating critical HR management systems covering seven different companies – a process that took us less than one month and brought savings up to 60 percent, compared to our previous solution. With AWS, we are becoming more agile and able to innovate quickly across different lines of business, including S:mile express delivery brand, and CarHub on-demand vehicle care services,” Faisal Alsamannoudi, Vice Chairman, Abdul Latif Jameel Commercial Development Company Ltd, said.
“Today’s news from AWS is fantastic as we continue accelerating our cloud adoption. Using AWS, we were able to become more agile and reliably launched five e-commerce platforms, such as Mamas & Papas, Nisnass.com, and Ounass alongside Android and iOS apps, all within a year. We rely on several AWS managed database services such as Amazon Aurora, where we were able to cut costs by 40 percent, while increasing performance by four times, compared with proprietary database technologies. We also leverage AWS spot instances to reduce operational cost by 79 percent. We see great potential to improve our business even further with the new AWS Middle East Region, which will enable us to serve our end customers with even lower latency,” Mohamed Al Fayed, Senior Vice President of OmniChannel, Al Tayer Retail, said.
Government organizations are also working with AWS to lower costs and better serve citizens in the region. The Bahrain Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) is responsible for ICT procurement for the Bahrain government and is leading the government’s migration project to support the country’s Cloud First policy.
“Bahrain is committed to becoming a country in the cloud and we will be able to accelerate our journey with the launch of the AWS Region in Bahrain. By December of this year, we will have 30 percent of all 72 government entities migrated to AWS and by June 2020, we expect to have most government data centers shut down, while the rest are minimized allowing us to focus resources on projects that benefit our citizens and dramatically improve the overall availability and durability of government applications and data,” iGA’s Chief Executive Mohammed Ali AlQaed said.
An example of a government entity that turned to the agility and speed of AWS is Bahrain’s National Bureau of Revenue (NBR), who needed to quickly and efficiently launch the country’s Value Added Tax (VAT) system.
“The National Bureau of Revenue needed a solution that would enable a seamless VAT rollout, without delays and with the highest levels of security. By launching SAP S/4 Hana on AWS, the NBR was able to go to market in just under two months while lowering costs by 40 percent. Eliminating the need to manage IT infrastructure allowed us to focus on successfully reaching an important milestone in Bahrain’s economic development. The launch of the new AWS Region in Bahrain is allowing public and private sector organizations to realize the full potential of the cloud,” Rana Faqihi, Assistant Undersecretary for Development and Revenue Policies at Bahrain Ministry of Finance, said.
Another government body in the Middle East welcoming the new AWS infrastructure Region is the Communication and Information Technology Regulatory Authority (CITRA), Kuwait’s regulator responsible for the country’s IT sector and technology adoption in the government.
“We welcome the launch of the new AWS Middle East Region as an important step in bringing reliable and secure cloud computing technologies closer to end users in the Middle East. This launch underlines the important location of the Middle East as a center to the global data movement worldwide. The presence of the AWS Middle East Region opens up new prospects for companies and government organizations to serve customers in the region, contributing to the enhancement of infrastructure, digitization, connectivity, and customer experience. Our significant work with AWS supports CITRA’s strategy of transforming Kuwait into a regional ICT hub, and the digitization of the Kuwaiti economy, and we look forward to continue to build on that while leveraging the new AWS Middle East Region in Bahrain,” Salem Muthib Al-Athainah, Chairman and CEO of CITRA said.
The most well-known and fastest growing businesses in the Middle East are also choosing AWS to launch and grow.
