AWS estimates that its projected spending on the construction and operation of the new Region will support an average of nearly 6,000 full-time jobs annually at external vendors, with a planned $5 billion (AED 20 billion) investment in the local economy through 2036.

Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS said, “with the launch of the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region, we are making it possible for even more customers to harness the power of the cloud to drive innovation across the UAE, while also investing in the local economy through job creation, training for highly sought-after technology skills, and education resources to further advance the UAE’s strategic priorities.”

“The opening of the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region is a significant milestone for Abu Dhabi and the UAE as a whole, reflecting our efforts to generate opportunities for all,” said His Excellency Mohamed Ali Al Shorafa, Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development.

The AWS Middle East (UAE) Region consists of three Availability Zones and joins the existing AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region, which opened in July 2019. Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high-availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks.

Al Ghurair Investments, Al Tayer Group, Aramex, Axiom Telecom, Flydubai, Gulf News, and OSN are among the enterprises that have chosen AWS.

The post AWS Launches Its Data Center (Region) in the United Arab Emirates appeared first on The Integrator.

R&M is a top tier solution provider in the structured cabling industry and in data center, LAN and telecom verticals. The company’s portfolio is based on well-established Swiss quality standards.

Commenting on the partnership, Mr. Nicholas Argyrides, General Manager – Gulf at Mindware said, “R&M is a leading global cabling and connectivity solution provider and the company’s diversified and high-quality solutions perfectly complement Mindware’s portfolio. We are confident that Mindware’s wide market coverage through our reseller network, well-established supply chain system, and long-standing experience in distribution strategies are key to supporting the growth strategy of R&M in the region.”

“Serving the channel for more than three decades, Mindware today enjoys a top position in the enterprise software and hardware distribution in the Middle East. We hope that this is the beginning of a long term, mutually beneficial partnership that will fuel the growth of R&M and Mindware in the region,” concluded Mr. Nabil Khalil, Executive Vice President, Middle East, Turkey and Africa at R&M.

The post Mindware and R&M Sign Regional Distribution Agreement appeared first on The Integrator.

According to an official release, Tony Ojobo, President of the Board of Trustee of the ICT Foundation and Former Public Affairs Director of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and a few other industry representatives attended the launch event that took place at the Lagos Oriental Hotel in the city of Lagos.

Chidi Oliseowe, Team Lead, Madonna Systems Nigeria Limited said, “Today the world depends so much on data to the point where we can say data is life, and data security cannot be over emphasized. We at Madonna Systems are so proud to be associated with Acronis, a foremost leader in cyber protection. With the opening of their new Data Centre in Nigeria, Acronis demonstrates its level of commitment to the Africa Market.”

“A local presence is a necessity for modern cloud businesses and we are proud to deliver the Acronis Cyber Cloud Data Center in Nigeria,” said Peter French Regional General Manager Middle East & Africa at Acronis. He added, “now, Nigerian companies, and businesses from neighbor countries too, will be able to store their strategic data locally while being backed by a global partner who is on standby 24/7/365 to address any issues.”

The post Acronis Launches Its First Cloud Data Center in Nigeria appeared first on The Integrator.

An official release from Equinix stated that sustainable innovations, including liquid cooling, high-density cooling, intelligent power management, and on-site prime power generation, will be incubated in the CIF in partnership with leading data center technology innovators including Bloom Energy, Zutacore, Virtual Power Systems (VPS) and Natron.

Raouf Abdel, EVP, Global Operations at Equinix, commented, “the data center of the future must be sustainable. Equinix is committed to sustainability globally as evidenced by its target to be climate neutral across our business by 2030. We are well on our way with over 90% renewable energy coverage worldwide. And thanks to the work we’re doing with partners at the CIF, we’re continuing to make significant advancements in the way we design, build and operate our global platform, with high energy efficiency standards.”

Equinix offers the following to its partners from the facility:

Generator-less and UPS-less Data Centers (Bloom Energy): Utilizing on-site solid oxide fuel cells enables the data center to generate redundant cleaner energy on-grid and potentially eliminates the need for fossil fuel-powered generators and power-consuming Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) systems.

High-Density Liquid Cooling (ZutaCore): Highly efficient, direct-on-chip, waterless, two-phase liquid-cooled rack systems, capable of cooling upwards of 100 kW per rack in a light, compact design. Eliminates the risk of IT meltdown, minimizes use of scarce resources including energy, land, construction, and water, and dramatically shrinks the data center footprint.

Software-Defined Power (VPS) with cabinet-mounted Battery Energy Storage (Natron Energy): Cabinet power management and battery energy storage system manages power draw and minimizes power stranding to near zero percent, leading to a potential 30-50% improvement of power efficiency.

The post Equinix Opens Sustainable Co-Innovation Facility for Its Partners appeared first on The Integrator.

The opening of the South Africa data center is part of the Acronis Global/Local Initiative, an effort that includes global management for all data centers, geographic redundancy, control for local partners, and a local disaster recovery site. The goal of this initiative is that service providers will have no trouble meeting the ever-changing compliance, data sovereignty, and performance requirements they and their clients face.

“A local presence is a necessity for modern cloud businesses and we are proud to deliver the Acronis Cyber Cloud Data Center in South Africa”, said Peter French Regional General Manager Middle East and Africa at Acronis. “Now they can safeguard client data locally and know that they are backed by a global partner who is on standby 24/7/365 to address any issues.”

Acronis provides cyber protection for data, applications, and systems with antivirus, backup, disaster recovery, and endpoint protection management solutions powered by AI.

The post Acronis Launches Cloud Data Center in South Africa appeared first on The Integrator.

How Dell helps small, medium, and large enterprises with digital transformation?

Digital transformation is a top priority for businesses in the Middle East as organizations, both large and small, that continue to leverage the latest technologies to drive innovation and growth.

Regional businesses have transformed the way they consume and deploy software infrastructure and applications. This includes a growing demand for cloud technologies, with a focus on hybrid models, which enable businesses to adapt and grow in today’s data-driven, location-independent era. This shift was noted in Dell’s Digital Transformation Index study, where 80 percent of global businesses accelerated their digital transformation plans, with 79 percent reinventing their business model due to disruption caused by the pandemic. In the region, the study showed that 90 percent of organizations in UAE and Saudi Arabia, fast-tracked their digital transformation programs in 2020.

Murray Irvine, Senior Director, Data Centre Compute and Solutions – MERAT, Dell

In this critical time of change, Dell Technologies’ end-to-end product and services enable customers to create remote workforces, secure critical data, and scale without disruption.  It works closely with small, medium, and large enterprises to address pressing business challenges with its world-class, end-to-end services, and solutions that span the cloud, data center, and the edge.

Tell us how cloud-based infrastructure and platforms offered by Dell help businesses grow, improve flexibility, and increase profitability?

Dell Technologies Cloud is a suite of cloud solutions that provide a consistent operating model for easier management of public, private, and edge cloud resources. Reports cite that over 50% of infrastructure will be deployed at the edge by 2023, which illustrates the value of multi-cloud to manage all environments consistently. It provides organizations with convenient and on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources including servers, storage, applications, networks, and other computing services.

Rather than acquiring, installing, and maintaining computing technology on-premises, with the Dell Technologies Cloud services, organizations can quickly add capacity without incurring capital expense while significantly increasing agility and scalability. It allows organizations to simplify operations, improve cloud economics, eliminate operational silos and manage hybrid cloud infrastructure with ease.

Furthermore, the solutions combine cost-effective, scalable, and resilient data storage with native public cloud services to deliver the best of both worlds for the cloud. These solutions are ideal for deploying demanding, data-intensive applications on multiple public clouds. The services are fully-managed by Dell Technologies, thereby freeing an organizations’ valuable resources to run their business rather than managing the infrastructure.

Kindly articulate hybrid cloud and differentiate it from multi-cloud services from a business perspective

Hybrid cloud environments are composed of two or more public or private cloud infrastructures that are connected by standardized technology for orchestrating workloads across clouds, enabling cloud resources to work together to manage cloud servers, storage, and networking resources.

Multi-cloud computing on the other hand refers to the use of multiple cloud services rather than relying on a single cloud service provider. A multi-cloud environment typically uses two or more public cloud services (provided by third-party providers). Multi-cloud environments may also include a private cloud, which involves cloud technology that resides within a company’s own data center.

As opposed to multi-cloud environments where each cloud has its own set of tools and processes, a hybrid cloud with a consistent management experience provides a common set of tools, significantly reducing the cost and complexity of managing hybrid cloud environments.  Enterprises today are transitioning from multi-cloud strategies to hybrid cloud environments to extract more benefit from their cloud investments.

Speak about the collaborations that Dell have made to strengthen its cloud deployment and support services

Our partners are at the forefront of solving customers’ most pressing cloud challenges and we’re focused on continuing to build this ecosystem for the benefit of our customers. They play an instrumental role in instilling the possibility of what can be achieved while guiding customers through a data-centric and insights-driven roadmap.

Businesses understand that having the right partner to collaborate in today’s fast-paced environment is truly a competitive advantage. We enable enterprises to seamlessly extend the hybrid cloud experience to partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and more than 4,200 additional cloud partners.

Discuss the scope of cloud-based infrastructure and related solutions in the post-pandemic era

Hybrid cloud is proving to be a significant gamechanger as organizations look to unify their environments and get superior flexibility, scale, agility, innovation, and a consumption model that aligns with their business needs.

This includes incorporating a mix of on-premises data centers to public clouds and the emerging edge —allowing them to have greater control of their workloads, data, and cloud journey. By 2022, IDC predicts that over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a cloud mix to meet their needs, with 2021 being a defining year for the multi-cloud.

The increased interest in hybrid cloud is driven mainly by cloud edge computing. As enterprises turn to cloud edge computing to better manage and process the vast amount of data being generated by edge devices, they seek more hybrid cloud architecture solutions to help them streamline their operations. This shift will drive momentum for hybrid cloud operating models that extend out to the edge, beyond the traditional data center. As adoption increases, we will see more organizations taking up as-a-service models for the cloud, spanning Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas), Platform-as-a-service (Paas), and Software-as-a-service (SaaS) to leverage the benefits cloud offers.

This presents a real opportunity for customers to increase investments in distributed technology infrastructure. In particular, ensuring that the tech infrastructure they invest in is simpler and faster to deploy. Dell Technologies enables organizations to unlock better outcomes by building on tools and skill set that provide a consistent experience across hybrid cloud environments.

The post Dell Enables Enterprises to Unlock Better Outcomes With Hybrid-Cloud Environments appeared first on The Integrator.

Talk us through your career journey?

Having graduated from Middlesex University, I have tried my luck in the UK entering the accounting profession. I soon realized that I was not much interested in penetrating the profession of an accountant/auditor I decided to move back home and look for more opportunities. It was at that time 6 years ago that I was introduced to the ASBIS Group and joined as a Credit Control Assistant. During that period of significant changes in the group in 2017, there was an opening for a Senior Credit Risk Manager in our subsidiary in ASBIS Middle East in Dubai, and I was offered the opportunity there. Ever since I have been evolving in this role and have been enjoying my role as the company’s risk manager. I sincerely believe that I have found what I was looking for and I see myself in this role for a long time to come.

Konstantinos Konstantinoum, Chief Risk Officer, ASBIS

Is the role of the CRO in IT distribution different today from what it was 10 years ago?

The role of a CRO in IT distribution has changed significantly throughout the last ten years. The world financial crisis of 2008 has forced things to change drastically. In the past, being a CRO meant that you were sitting in an office, analyzing your risks and making decisions based on these analyses. This has radically changed since unless someone understands his/her client from A to Z, is not in a position to make the best decision for both parties. Currently, there are multiple tools and access to information is much easier, which makes the life of a CRO easier and more educated.

How does a CRO create value especially when the current market is slow?

The creation of value has always been a major subject of discussion. Especially for us, who are not at the sales or marketing divisions of our organizations and we are dealing with the risk management and other aspects of the financial welfare of our organizations. It is tough to ascertain the value-added; however, ASBIS has invested heavily and made the role of risk manager significant and forced all members of risk management to add value in the chain of our operations. The constant training, the commercialization of risk services as well as the constant upgrade of the tools used allow a modern CRO to add significant value, but enhancing the credit availability and therefore increasing safe trading

What do you love most about your job?

Working in a multinational environment, getting to know so many different customers from so different ethnic, cultural and financial environments, makes every day at work exciting. The challenge of each day is by itself a unique driver which is very rare to find. If there is a perfect job satisfaction level, I strongly believe that being a risk manager in ASBIS, is very close to perfection.

The post Risk Management and Safe Trading; ASBIS Leads the Way appeared first on The Integrator.

The Huawei Cloud Oasis Program was launched during the Cloud Summit held virtually this year in September. The annual event connected business leaders and Huawei partners.

Eric Wan, VP of Cloud Marketing, Ecosystem & Partner Development at Huawei Middle East, said: “Since launching Huawei Cloud, we have sought to nurture a localized, innovative cloud ecosystem in all the markets where we operate. The Huawei Cloud Oasis Program will thus provide truly unique and rewarding offerings to local businesses.”

An official release of the company stated, “The Huawei Cloud Oasis Program has set a target to assist 3,000 experts in the region, support over 1,500 consulting and technical partners, and empower more than 100 SMEs to develop their cloud capabilities.” The latest investment includes USD7.5 million being allocated for partner development, over USD2.5 million to be put behind credits and other cloud resources, and more than USD4.5 million in marketing support for program projects.

Currently, Huawei Cloud has more than 220 services available, with 18 global and one local data center providing these services.

The post Huawei to invest USD15mn in Middle East Huawei Cloud Oasis Program appeared first on The Integrator.

It’s been a year and a half since we first learned about Covid-19, but the pressure on businesses to accelerate their digital transformation (DX) efforts has not abated. Of particular note is the rise of the hybrid work model.

There are two things the pandemic has proven about the ‘new’ workplace:

1) DX in businesses is essential, and

2) Technology was intrinsic to a transformational overhaul of this scale.

That technology is edge computing: The ability to optimize and extend the capability of cloud computing by bringing computation and data storage closer to the devices where it’s being gathered. It’s a fairly amorphous concept that has been around since the 1990s, but thanks to the pandemic, it has given rise to edge computing’s dark horse: the remote worker.

The pandemic has hit each market across the Middle East differently but a common theme regarding the workplace is that data is increasingly born, created, and modified in different places. While the future of work is well and truly here, businesses are still navigating uncharted waters in this space.

This begs many questions of decision makers: What’s the best way to capture and protect data? Does my edge approach meet privacy and security needs? There has been a significant shift in the approach to remote work and there’s a way that businesses can best set their employees up to ensure business continuity. It lies with edge computing – a key technology to futureproofing the new workplace environment.

Don’t Let Implementation Dictate the Outcome

According to Juniper Research, edge computing is on a growth path to U$8.3 billion spend globally, in less than five years. This has no doubt been exacerbated with the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices.  According to a report by AT Kearney Research, the IoT solutions market in the GCC will be worth $11 billion by the year 2025, generating potential value for the economy of nearly $160 billion.

As our new workplaces constitute more and more remote points of presence – mobile, tablet, smart speakers – which sees a vast amount of data being generated on the outer edge of computing networks, the task of implementing an edge strategy may fall into the too-hard basket for many, and simply out of reach for some. However, the key to edge computing success lies in focusing on the outcome, before looking at implementation.

Every business wants to analyze and activate their data, at speed, but the power of edge computing does not mean all data has to be analyzed and activated. Rather, it helps businesses ascertain at which aggregation points is best to consume data, preserve it, make inferences from, where analytics is applied, and knowledge is gleaned from. For one business, the impact could simply be installing on-site servers capable of real-time analysis. For another, it could be installing IoT sensors to help transmit data from security cameras.

Like any technology solution, implementation for the sake of doing so is not going to benefit any business. However, the edge is relevant for any business that has digitally transformed its processes, especially in the last 12 months. Edge computing allows businesses to focus on how to get the most out of their most important data, and in turn, keep up with the pace at which the workplace is transforming.

Securing the Edge

An edge strategy doesn’t mean data protection, security, and compliance efforts have to be more complicated. Traditionally, endpoint backup has been the most underrated rack of technologies but as the benefits of edge computing gain traction, its use case takes on a whole new level. And the good news is that there isn’t much ‘reinventing the wheel’ involved.

Why? The edge isn’t entirely new – it’s an extension of what we’ve known. As an accelerant of digital transformation, it’s breaking down the data center walls and pushing cloud capabilities outwards. Businesses need to remember that the edge must be treated as part of hybrid cloud architecture, of which technologies are already being used by employees to provide a seamless and secure IT experience.

Edge computing is critical to ensuring a seamless transition from the traditional workplace setting to the future of work. It is here now, and it’s hybrid. To realize its full potential, businesses must focus on the outcome rather than the implementation of the technology.

The post The Democratization of the Workplace Through Edge Computing appeared first on The Integrator.

The pandemic’s acceleration of cloud migration within enterprises has, at this point, been well documented. Last year’s Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report suggested that more than 90 percent of enterprises now have a multi-cloud strategy.

Even in times of great urgency as we have experienced over the last 18 months, enterprise-wide cloud transformations don’t simply happen overnight. In the rush to get their multi-cloud environments off the ground and enable remote connectivity for their workforces, many enterprises will not have suitably adapted their IT and network infrastructure to support applications in a multi-cloud connected environment. Because of this, they will likely now be facing numerous challenges around the performance of mission-critical SaaS applications, automation of cloud security services, and integration of WAN applications in the public cloud, to name just a few.

When it comes to meeting and addressing these challenges, enterprises could consider the benefits of an SD-WAN platform which, through a mixture of optimization, orchestration centralization, and automation can provide a firm foundation for enabling a successful, performant, and secure multi-cloud environment.

Ensuring User Experience Through SaaS Optimization

In a time when applications were hosted in corporate data centers, routing all application traffic from the branch to the data center made total sense. Today, however, with most applications in modern enterprises delivered through SaaS, backhauling cloud-destined traffic to the data center only serves to increase latency and impact application performance.

Recognizing this, enterprises could reduce said latency by looking towards a modern, best-of-breed Edge-based SD-WAN platform, which should offer SaaS optimization features to seamlessly and securely connect users from branch sites to SaaS applications, while simultaneously monitoring the SaaS Quality of Experience (QoE).

Key functionalities that any SD-WAN purchaser should look out for include first-packet identification, wherein applications are identified and classified on the first packet, which enables traffic to be routed dynamically to its intended destination (be that the data center, cloud provider, or cloud security). This, in turn, reduces latency and ensures security policies are adhered to. Similarly, Microsoft Office 365 API integration enables secure internet breakout to the closest Office 365 entry point, thus ensuring the best Office 365 performance available.

Intelligent Local Internet Breakout

Different classes of application require different kinds of treatment to adhere to security policies and controls. As mentioned above, first-packet identification has a part to play here, but other functionalities within leading SD-WAN platforms can bolster security without impacting application performance.

Different applications can be mapped to virtual WAN overlays, each supporting various QoS, transport, and failover characteristics. For instance, trusted business SaaS such as Office 365 can be mapped to an overlay that traffics straight to the closest SaaS instance over the internet, whilst untrusted or unknown traffic is sent to the headquarters-based firewall for closer inspection.

Speaking of firewalls, having a unified zone-based stateful firewall at the WAN Edge is essential to ensure complete, secure local internet breakout. A WAN Edge firewall can connect directly to trusted SaaS applications and IaaS from branch offices, whilst also blocking any unauthorized traffic attempting to enter the branch network from the enterprise LAN.

Network Simplification Through SD-WAN Integration

Complexity is the enemy when it comes to network management, and this is most true for particularly large, global networks with many AWS Virtual Private Clouds or Microsoft Virtual Networks (VNets). However, an Edge-based SD-WAN platform can greatly simplify the management of such large networks.

By connecting directly to public cloud providers’ global backbone networks, reducing the number of point-to-point connections, and connecting branch locations directly to regional points of presence (POPs) the complexity of the SD-WAN overlay is reduced. An SD-WAN overlay should also support branch-to-branch communication without virtual gateways at each Virtual Private Cloud.

The Emergence of SASE

The emergence of SASE has had a profound impact on SD-WAN. Just as SD-WAN is transforming the network infrastructure with uninterrupted connectivity and simplified workflows, SASE takes the logical next step by placing cloud-native security controls closer to the end-users where the data is being generated (at the network Edge) and is, therefore, most at risk.

Although SASE is not a technology on its own, as an architectural framework it offers organizations the capability to bring together security and networking functions into a single, cloud-based service model. In 2021, SD-WAN should form the foundation of a SASE solution: a cloud-programmable networking platform for orchestrating and centrally managing the network, security, and SASE components.

As part of this, any quality Edge-based SD-WAN must integrate with third-party cloud security services from best-of-breed cloud security firms. Advanced API integration within the SD-WAN platform can enable network managers to fully realize enterprise-wide automation of consistent, network-wide security policies. In this way, they can combine the advantages of an advanced Zero Trust WAN Edge on-premises, whilst also enjoying the flexibility and freedom of choice to enjoy the benefits of cloud-delivered security services from their preferred security vendor.

The post Simplifying Multi-Cloud Connectivity through SD-WAN appeared first on The Integrator.