BY: Owais Mohammed, Regional Lead & Sales Director at WD for the Middle East, Africa, Turkey, and the Indian Subcontinent

The UAE’s ambition to become a global AI powerhouse is well established. Government investment is flowing, infrastructure is scaling, and organisations across every sector are accelerating their AI programs. But beneath the strategic announcements and the technology deployments, a fundamental question goes unanswered: is the data storage infrastructure underpinning all this built for what comes next?

For many organisations, the honest answer is: not yet. Storage is rarely the first conversation in an AI strategy discussion. It tends to be treated as a commodity decision made late in the planning cycle, long after the headline architecture choices like GPUs/CPUs have been made. That approach made sense in simpler times, but not in today’s data-driven AI economy.

The scale of what is coming

To understand why, organisations need to understand the sheer data volume that is coming their way. Global data creation is forecast to rise to 718.5 Zettabytes (ZB) through 2030 (IDC source: Market Forecast: IDC Global DataSphere Forecast, 2026-2030, June 2026, Doc #US53425426), more than tripling in five years.

AI is both a driver and a consumer of this growth. Every model trained, every inference run, every data pipeline operating continuously across a distributed architecture is generating and demanding access to data at a scale that earlier generations of infrastructure were not designed to support.

Businesses that will absorb this growth successfully are not those with the fastest individual components. They are those with architectures designed to handle volume, variety, and velocity simultaneously, at a cost that remains economically sustainable as scale increases. That is the storage strategy challenge that needs to be addressed upfront and not as an afterthought.

Why a single technology cannot solve it

A common mistake is to frame the storage decision as a technology choice: SSDs versus HDDs, flash versus spinning disk, performance versus capacity. The world’s most sophisticated storage operators, including hyperscalers and major cloud service providers, have already moved past this framing. They do not choose one technology. They deploy multiple of them, in a tiered architecture that places data on the medium best suited to its requirements.

The logic is straightforward. SSDs deliver the high IOPS and low latency that real-time, performance-critical applications demand. HDDs provide the massive capacity and cost efficiency required for the vast middle tier of active and warm data, and currently continue to represent approximately 63% of worldwide installed storage capacity through 2030. Tape generally handles archival, regulatory, and compliance workloads where retrieval times of hours or days are acceptable, representing just under 8% of worldwide installed cloud storage capacity in 2025.

These are not competing technologies. They are complementary ones, each serving a distinct purpose within a coherent architecture. The question is how each is deployed where it delivers the greatest value.

Making tiered architectures work in practice

Knowing that tiered storage is the right model and implementing it effectively are two different things. At the scale hyperscalers operate, where storage volumes are measured in hundreds of exabytes, manual allocation of data across tiers is neither practical nor efficient.  Nor can all data live on cost prohibitive flash. The mechanism that makes tiered architecture manageable is software-defined storage (SDS), which pools resources centrally and provisions capacity dynamically based on demand. Rather than pre-allocating fixed capacity to individual applications, SDS responds to where data needs to be, improving overall utilisation and reducing waste.

Together, tiered architecture and SDS provide the flexibility and economic efficiency that hyperscale environments depend on. But this model is not the exclusive preserve of the world’s largest operators. For emerging infrastructure providers, including Neoclouds that are expanding rapidly across the region, the same principles apply. Architecture decisions made today will determine whether future growth is economically sustainable or structurally constrained. The window to get this right is earlier than many organisations assume.

Innovation at the storage level

Architectural thinking also changes how storage technology itself must evolve. An organisation that understands its workloads, plans for data growth, and builds tiered infrastructure will eventually reach the limits of what current storage innovations can deliver. That is why, manufacturers like WD are approaching HDDs not only as a mature, reliable product but as a technology with significant headroom remaining to help increase capacity, lower power and cost effectively scale AI data. They are advancing recording technologies, exploring novel materials, and embedding intelligence at the drive level. The aim is not incremental improvement. It is expanding the boundary of what high-capacity storage can deliver for the architectures customers are building today and the workloads they will run tomorrow.

The leadership dimension

The organisations that navigate the AI era most effectively will not be those that simply procure the latest hardware. It will be those that understand the architectural decisions that determine long-term performance, cost and scale, ask better questions earlier in the planning process, and treat storage infrastructure strategy as a source of competitive advantage rather than a procurement exercise.

Storage sits at the foundation of every AI workload, every data pipeline, and every digital service an organisation delivers. Getting the architecture right is not a technical detail. It is a leadership decision. And in a market moving as quickly as the UAE’s, it is one that deserves to be made with the same rigour and strategic intent as any other.

By Joe David, CEO of Nephos Group

“Move to Dubai for tax.”

I hear this constantly. From founders, investors, crypto-native operators – people building real businesses who reduce one of the biggest decisions of their professional lives to a single line on a spreadsheet.

And honestly, it is the wrong way to think about it.

Tax should rarely be the sole reason to relocate. When it is, it is usually where things go wrong. The corporate structure is not set up correctly. The banking relationships are not in place. The founder leaves within 18 months because the deeper rationale was never really there. I have seen this pattern play out dozens of times over the past decade, and it almost always traces back to the same root cause: a decision built on a tax rate rather than a strategy.

The tax-first trap

Dubai’s zero per cent personal income tax rate is real, and it is significant. But leading with tax creates a narrow frame that obscures the fuller picture. Founders who relocate purely for a rate often fail to consider the operational realities of building in a new jurisdiction. They underestimate the compliance infrastructure required to make the move defensible. They overlook the substance requirements that tax authorities in their home countries will scrutinise. When the expected savings do not materialise cleanly, because the structure was an afterthought, disillusionment sets in fast.

This does Dubai a disservice. It reduces a genuinely world-class business environment to a line in a tax planning brochure. The city deserves better than that, and so do the founders making life-altering decisions based on incomplete thinking.

What the successful ones actually optimise for

The founders and investors who get the most out of Dubai are not chasing a tax rate. They are making a broader strategic move.

Jurisdictional access is a major factor. Dubai sits at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and Asia, offering time zone coverage and travel connectivity that few cities can match. For businesses operating across multiple markets, particularly in digital assets, fintech and professional services, that geographic positioning is a genuine competitive edge.

Then there is the capital environment. Dubai has become a magnet for institutional and private capital, with fund structures, family offices and venture vehicles establishing a permanent presence. The banking infrastructure, while still maturing in certain areas, has improved significantly. For crypto-native businesses in particular, the regulatory clarity offered by frameworks like the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) provides something that many Western jurisdictions still cannot: a clear, codified path to operating legally with digital assets.

The business ecosystem itself is another draw. The speed at which you can incorporate, hire, open accounts and begin operating is remarkable compared to legacy jurisdictions. Free zones offer tailored licensing, and the government’s responsiveness to emerging sectors – AI, blockchain, tokenised finance – signals a jurisdiction that is building forward rather than regulating backward.

And then, yes, there is the lifestyle. Climate, safety, connectivity, quality of infrastructure. These are not trivial considerations when you are asking a founding team to commit to a base for the next five to ten years.

Tax is often the outcome of all of this. It is not the strategy itself.

The compliance landscape is shifting

There is another reason the tax-first mindset is increasingly risky. The global compliance environment is tightening rapidly. The Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), developed by the OECD, will require automatic exchange of information on crypto transactions between jurisdictions. The EU’s DAC8 directive introduces similar obligations across member states. The days of relocating and assuming your home country’s tax authority will not follow are numbered.

This means that substance, genuine economic activity, real operational presence, defensible corporate structures, matters more than ever. A Dubai relocation that is purely cosmetic will not survive scrutiny. One that is built on genuine strategic foundations, with proper advisory support and compliant structures, will.

The conversation worth having

None of this is an argument against moving to Dubai. Quite the opposite. For the right founder, with the right business, at the right stage, it can be a transformative decision. But that decision needs to be grounded in strategy, not arithmetic.

Before you start calculating your tax savings, ask the harder questions. Does your business model benefit from being in this jurisdiction? Can you build genuine substance here? Are your corporate structures defensible under international reporting frameworks? Do you have the advisory infrastructure to get this right from day one?

That distinction – between tax as a tactic and strategy as a foundation – matters more than most people realise. And it is a conversation worth having before you make any decisions.

By: Avi Pardo, Co-Founder & CBO, LeapXpert

Financial firms globally have similar playbooks for off-channel communications: ban the channel, run a training, and send attestations for signing. Yet, the conversations are still happening on personal phones. Calling that playbook ‘good enough’ only hides how little has changed.

More than 100 organisations have faced charges under the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s off-channel communications initiative, while other regulators have pursued similar failures. Yet the response is still another rule, another warning, another ban.

The missing piece is the psychology behind banning. Until firms understand what drives employees towards off-channel apps, even banned ones, the next record-keeping failure is already on its way.

Why employees find workarounds

These channels are already part of the client relationship. A banker may be chasing a decision, dealing with a concern or replying to a question that has come through on Signal, WeChat or WhatsApp. In that moment, getting back to the client takes priority.

If replying through the approved channel takes too long, creates operational friction, or disrupts the conversation flow, the employee is likely to answer somewhere else. The message gets sent, but the firm may never see the full exchange.

Psychologists have studied this response to bans for decades. Jack Brehm’s work on psychological reactance shows people can push back when they feel their freedom of choice has been restricted. Research into imposed workplace change points to the same response: people who feel pushed into a new way of working may quietly find another route. Someone reads the policy, completes the training and then uses a personal phone when a client needs an answer.

Daniel Wegner’s work on ironic rebound also helps explain why bans can misfire. Tell people often enough to avoid something and it can make it more appealing. The channel remains on the phone, the client is waiting and the approved route takes longer.

Once the conversation moves to a personal phone, the firm may never recover the full exchange. Employers also face legal limits on how far they can inspect a private device.

Governance beats the workaround

Governance should redirect behaviour instead of trying to suppress it. Employees need an approved route that works while the client conversation is happening, or the workaround will keep winning.

Financial firms still need clear rules and a complete record of business conversations. Regulators expect those messages to be kept, whether they were sent by email, text, WhatsApp or another service.

The problem usually shows up during an ordinary working day: between meetings, on a journey or while a client is waiting for an answer. If the approved channel holds things up, few people will pause the conversation to sort out the process. They will reply another way.

Businesses are losing valuable conversation data

Regulatory risk is obvious when messages go missing: a firm cannot supervise what it cannot see or produce records that were never captured.

Client conversations carry information a business would want to know: a concern raised weeks before a relationship starts to slip, pricing pushback that never reaches the CRM or a salesperson handling a difficult exchange in a way others could learn from. Repeated questions may also point to problems with onboarding, service or product design.

Governed communication creates a record the organisation can learn from. Applied responsibly, conversation data can support supervision, client service, dispute resolution, coaching and a clearer view of relationship risk.
That information is already being generated every day. The difference is whether it remains scattered across personal devices or becomes something the organisation can understand and act on.

Bring the conversation back into view

Plenty of companies have the basics in place: a policy, training and an approved tool. What is often missing is a setup that matches how people work and talk to clients.

The existence of a policy says very little about whether it works. ‘Good enough’ governance can leave a business with all the right paperwork while the same behaviour carries on underneath it.

A quick exchange can soon include a shared document, a follow-up question and another colleague joining the conversation. Messages, files, participants and timing all form part of the record, which needs to stay within the firm without someone rebuilding the exchange later.

If senior leaders use the same channels they have banned for everyone else, the policy is a sham. Employees follow what leaders do, rather than what the compliance manual says. Training can help, particularly when people understand the reason behind it. But explanations only go so far if the approved route slows down a live client conversation. Technology can capture the record, but leadership decides whether people take the rules seriously. No system can rescue a policy that senior figures ignore.

Keeping those exchanges within view gives the business more than a record for compliance. It can also pick up concerns, repeated questions and early signs that a client relationship is beginning to change.

More rules have not stopped the conversations. They have pushed them onto personal phones and out of sight. Calling that ‘good enough’ is no longer credible.