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.

Every year, Emirati Women’s Day offers a moment to pause and reflect on just how far Emirati women have come, and how much further their ambitions are taking them. Across artificial intelligence and technology, entrepreneurship, sustainability, industry and beyond, Emirati women are no longer simply entering these spaces, they are shaping them, leading critical decisions and setting new benchmarks for what is possible.

This progress has not happened by chance. It is the result of a national vision that has consistently placed women’s empowerment at the heart of the UAE’s development, widely regarded as the driving force behind the advancement of Emirati women. Together, these efforts have built an ecosystem of mentorship, opportunity and structural support that allows Emirati women to move beyond simply having a seat at the table to actively influencing the direction of entire industries.

This Emirati Women’s Day, we spoke to three Emirati women who are doing exactly that, each carving out space in fields as varied as AI infrastructure, entrepreneurship and industrial sustainability. Their stories reflect not only how far the journey has come, but also a shared sense of responsibility: to keep the doors open, and to inspire the next generation of Emirati women to walk through them with confidence.

Amal Almaamari, Program Director at Core42, (a G42 Company)

The UAE has created an environment where women are encouraged to pursue ambitious careers, take on meaningful responsibilities and contribute to sectors that are shaping the country’s future. As an Emirati woman working in AI, I see this opportunity firsthand. At Core42, I am able to contribute to the infrastructure and capabilities helping organizations adopt AI securely, at scale and with greater control over their data and technology.

What is particularly inspiring is seeing Emirati women increasingly take on roles across engineering, product development, strategy and leadership. The opportunities available today allow us not only to participate in the technology sector, but to build expertise, influence decisions and contribute to the UAE’s ambitions in AI and advanced technology.

Emirati Women’s Day is a celebration of that progress and the confidence the UAE continues to place in its women. It also reminds us of our responsibility to build on these opportunities and inspire the next generation of Emirati women to see technology as a field where they can grow, lead and make a lasting impact.

Amreen Iqbal, Founder and Creative Director of Piece of You

What stands out to me about building a business here is how much the UAE actively invests in women being part of its growth story. From mentorship networks to platforms that put Emirati entrepreneurs in front of the right audiences, the opportunities aren’t hypothetical, they’re structural. Piece of You exists because I had the confidence and support to take an idea and turn it into something real. On Emirati Women’s Day, I think about how many doors have opened for women in my generation that weren’t open before, and how many more are opening for the next one.

Hamda Al Shamsi, Admin Assistant at Geocycle Waste Recycling UAE at Holcim UAE

The UAE has created an environment where women are empowered to pursue their ambitions, develop their skills, and contribute meaningfully across every sector. Today, Emirati women are building careers in fields ranging from technology and engineering to sustainability, manufacturing, energy, and leadership.

As an Emirati woman and the only woman currently working at Geocycle UAE, I have personally experienced the importance of having the opportunity to step into a technical and industrial field and prove that there is a place for women in every sector.

For me, Emirati Women’s Day is a celebration of how far we have come, but also a reminder of the opportunities ahead. The support and vision of the UAE leadership, together with the efforts of Her Highness Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, have helped create a generation of Emirati women who are confident to pursue their goals and make a difference. I believe the next step is to continue encouraging young Emirati women to explore fields they may not traditionally consider. When women are given the opportunity to learn, lead, and contribute, they do not only build successful careers — they help build a stronger and more sustainable future for the UAE.

NETSCOUT® (NASDAQ: NTCT), a leading provider of observability, AIOps, cybersecurity, and DDoS attack protection solutions, today announced an extension of its Adaptive DDoS Protection (ADP) solution enabling service providers to automatically detect and mitigate outbound DDoS attack traffic. By extending protection from the attack target towards its source, NETSCOUT helps operators prevent compromised subscriber devices from disrupting their own networks, consuming costly capacity and attacking customers and organizations across the internet.

Consumer broadband routers, cameras and other IoT devices are increasingly being weaponized by Turbo-Mirai class botnets capable of generating multi-terabit attacks. These outbound attacks have already caused costly service outages, reputational damage and customer loss, and damage to peering relationships risking a large increase in transit costs at service providers around the world. By detecting and mitigating malicious traffic generated by compromised device populations before it leaves their networks, service providers can reduce abuse complaints and infrastructure costs while protecting their own networks and services and helping lower subscriber churn and regulatory risk.

“The combination of higher-speed broadband connectivity and vulnerable IoT devices has been weaponized by a new class of massive DDoS botnets,” said Patrick Donegan, founder and principal analyst, HardenStance. “Source-side mitigation, or attack suppression as it’s sometimes known, is a critical part of the equation. NETSCOUT’s approach, backed by its ATLAS Intelligence Feed (AIF) and ASERT analysts, gives service providers the tools they need to detect and stop attacks before they have an impact, protecting their customers and the broader internet from the large-scale DDoS attacks we have seen.”

Using AI-powered threat intelligence and automated detection and mitigation, NETSCOUT’s ADP solution, an addition to its Arbor Sightline and Arbor Threat Mitigation System:

• Automatically detects and mitigates ever evolving attacks through dynamic detection, intelligent redirection and adaptive mitigation.
• Extends these capabilities to outbound traffic, combining enhanced, customized detection with comprehensive threat intelligence tailored for each ISP.
• Uses NETSCOUT’s proprietary AI/ML-powered DDoS detection to analyze massive volumes of outbound internet traffic to uncover attacks designed to hide within legitimate flows.
• Draws on unique global real-time intelligence of DDoS activity covering approximately half of all internet traffic to rapidly detect and mitigate DDoS attacks and pinpoint the responsible, compromised devices.

“We are extending DDoS defense from the target to the source,” stated Darren Anstee, CTO, Security, NETSCOUT. “By using our internet-scale visibility to derive localized threat intelligence for our customers, NETSCOUT can identify and precisely suppress attacks at their origin, before they cause problems locally or at their target. This capability gives our customers a new level of comprehensive defense across their peering, transit, cloud and customer edges.”

This expansion of capabilities demonstrates how NETSCOUT is applying its global threat visibility and proven ADP solution to meet emerging service provider challenges. By extending an established inbound DDoS workflow to outbound and cross-bound threats, NETSCOUT enables operators to improve network-resilience, cost-controls and revenue protection through its proven Arbor Sightline and Arbor TMS solutions.