DUBAI — Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of AWS Outposts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). AWS Outposts delivers fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud.

AWS Outposts brings native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. With AWS Outposts, customers can use the same AWS APIs, control plane, tools, and hardware on-premises as in the AWS cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience.

Customers in the UAE and KSA who have workloads that require low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, or local data storage can benefit from AWS Outposts. These include applications that may need to generate near real-time responses, need to communicate with other on-premises systems, or control on-site equipment (e.g. factory floor equipment, health management systems, and retail point of sale systems).

Customers can also use AWS Outposts to securely store and process customer data in countries where there is no AWS Region. This is important for organizations in highly regulated industries and countries with data sovereignty requirements.

Andy Isherwood, managing director of Amazon Web Services EMEA, said, “We are pleased to bring AWS Outposts to the UAE and KSA. Following the launch of the Middle East Region in Bahrain last year, customers have been continually expanding their use of AWS and have asked us to help them with moving their most sensitive workloads to the cloud. AWS Outposts helps them to achieve this. It is also particularly beneficial for customers in UAE and KSA with low latency and local data processing requirements as AWS Outposts seamlessly and securely integrates with AWS Regions.”

Yuri Misnik, group CTO of First Abu Dhabi Bank, the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, said, “We look forward to leveraging AWS Outposts to transform the user experience for our banking customers. AWS Outposts will become an important part of FAB Cloud strategy. It will offer FAB the hybrid cloud infrastructure we need to build and deploy modern containerized workloads and the ability to benefit from AWS’s rapid pace of innovation in the cloud while being able to store and process data on-premises.”

Obeikan Investment Group (OIG), a major manufacturing and digital solutions company in Saudi Arabia, has relied on AWS to develop SANED, the group’s first end-to-end cloud based Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) platform for small and medium enterprises — which is set to launch in September.

Abdallah Obeikan, Group CEO of OIG, said, “We designed SANED as a business solution for finance, HR, supply chain, and manufacturing to eliminate the complexity of traditional Enterprise Resource Planning, with seamless user experience and data visualization. SANED integrates data and transactions using our best-in-class robotic process automation, relying on AWS’s leading cloud technology.

“We are pleased to see the introduction of AWS Outposts to Saudi Arabia. This will allow us to expand our use of AWS and enable Obeikan Digital offerings, business platforms, and industrial solutions to host our applications within Saudi borders while benefitting from the range of AWS services, as well as the scalability and resiliency of the cloud.”

Richard Hurley, clients and industries leader from Deloitte Middle East Consulting, welcomed the arrival of AWS Outposts to the UAE and KSA saying, “It’s great to see AWS Outposts being extended to the UAE and KSA, as the service addresses requests we have heard from organizations in the region looking to accelerate their cloud adoption.

“For some of our clients who are embarking on a digital transformation journey, AWS Outposts addresses their needs to run workloads on-premises while still being able to leverage much needed innovative technologies in the cloud, in order to complete the modernization of their business processes and services. We look forward to helping our customers further benefit from AWS Outposts to more rapidly innovate.”

AWS Outposts delivers pre-configured racks of compute and storage to bring AWS services, AWS designed infrastructure, and operating models on-premises. The infrastructure is the same as is used in AWS Regions.

With AWS Outposts customers can choose from a range of compute, storage, and graphics-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, both with and without local storage options, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume options.

Customers can then easily run a broad range of AWS services locally, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), and can connect directly to regional services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets or Amazon DynamoDB through private connections. — SG