Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that it plans to open an infrastructure region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the first half of 2022. The new AWS Middle East (UAE) Region will consist of three Availability Zones and become AWS’s second region in the Middle East with the existing AWS Region in Bahrain, giving customers more choice and flexibility to leverage advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud. Globally, AWS has 80 Availability Zones across 25 geographic regions, with plans to launch 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.
“We are excited to build on the great momentum of cloud adoption in the Middle East by providing more choice for customers in the UAE to run applications and store data locally,” said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure, AWS. “The new AWS Region supports the UAE’s focus on promoting technology innovation that has made it a thriving global hub for entrepreneurs, e-governments, and multi-national businesses. With the new region, organisations of all sizes will be able to innovate faster and serve end-users with even lower latency across the region.”
His Excellency Mohammed Ali Al Shorafa, Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development, said, “AWS’s expansion into the UAE is a testament to our rapidly growing innovation ecosystem that will benefit from access to the world’s leading cloud platform and its advanced technologies and solutions. Building on Abu Dhabi’s smart infrastructure and digital transformation, AWS’s investment will further enable innovators and companies with globally-relevant solutions to realise new opportunities in the UAE and beyond.”
AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that leverage multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones and across multiple regions to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The addition of the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region will enable local customers with data residency requirements to store their data in the UAE while also providing even lower latency across the country.
Supporting startups, skills, and students
The new AWS Middle East Region (UAE) Region will build upon AWS’s existing investment in the country, which includes two AWS Direct Connect locations and two Amazon CloudFront edge locations launched in 2018. AWS also continues to build teams of account managers, technical account managers, partner managers, systems engineers, solutions architects, professional services, and more roles to help customers of all sizes move to AWS.
In addition to infrastructure, AWS continues to make investments in education initiatives, training, and start-up enablement programs to support the UAE’s digital transformation and economic development plans. To foster entrepreneurship and the growth of new businesses in the UAE, AWS will be further expanding the AWS Activate program to support the UAE’s startups and SMBs. Through the AWS Training and Certification programs, AWS will also work with government entities to support the up-skilling and re-training of the workforce with the latest cloud computing training curriculum. For students and educators, AWS will provide higher education institutions and their educators with cloud computing courses to prepare students to pursue industry-recognised certifications and careers in cloud computing.
