Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, has opened the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region, raising its Availability Zones to 69 within 22 geographic regions around the world.

AWS also announced plans for nine more Availability Zones across three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Italy, and South Africa. Developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations can run their applications and serve end-users from data centers located in the Middle East, as well as leverage advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud, to drive innovation.

“The cloud has the chance to unlock digital transformation in the Middle East,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services. “Today, we are launching advanced and secure technology infrastructure that matches the scale of our other AWS Regions around the world and are already seeing strong demand in the Middle East for AWS technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics, IoT, and much more. We are excited to see how our cloud technology will provide new ways for governments to better engage with citizens, for enterprises to innovate for their next phase of growth, and for entrepreneurs to build businesses and compete on a global scale.”

The new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region offers three Availability Zones at launch. AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones, which each comprise at least one data center and are located in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications.

Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault-tolerance.AWS infrastructure Regions meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection.

Millions of active customers are using AWS each month in over 190 countries around the world, including tens of thousands of customers in the Mena region.

Government organizations are also working with AWS to lower costs and better serve citizens in the region. The Bahrain Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) is responsible for ICT procurement for the Bahrain government and is leading the government’s migration project to support the country’s Cloud First policy.

iGA’s chief executive Mohammed Ali AlQaed said: “Bahrain is committed to becoming a country in the cloud and we will be able to accelerate our journey with the launch of the AWS Region in Bahrain. By December of this year, we will have 30 percent of all 72 government entities migrated to AWS and by June 2020, we expect to have most government data centers shut down, while the rest are minimized allowing us to focus resources on projects that benefit our citizens and dramatically improve the overall availability and durability of government applications and data.”

An example of a government entity that turned to the agility and speed of AWS is Bahrain’s National Bureau of Revenue (NBR), who needed to quickly and efficiently launch the country’s value-added tax (VAT) system.

Rana Faqihi, assistant undersecretary for Development and Revenue Policies at Bahrain Ministry of Finance, said: “The National Bureau of Revenue needed a solution that would enable a seamless VAT rollout, without delays and with the highest levels of security. By launching SAP S/4Hana on AWS, the NBR was able to go to market in just under two months while lowering costs by 40 percent.

“Eliminating the need to manage IT infrastructure allowed us to focus on successfully reaching an important milestone in Bahrain’s economic development. The launch of the new AWS Region in Bahrain is allowing public and private sector organizations to realize the full potential of the cloud.”

AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners also welcomed the arrival of the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region. The APN includes tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and Systems Integrators (SI) around the world.

APN Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support.

The new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region adds to the infrastructure investments AWS has been making across the Middle East, to provide customers with advanced and secure cloud technologies.

AWS has also launched a new AWS Direct Connect location in Bahrain, which is the first to be operated by AWS, joining the two AWS Direct Connect locations and two Amazon CloudFront Edge locations in the UAE that launched in 2018. AWS Direct Connect makes it easy for customers to establish a dedicated private network connection between AWS and their datacenter, office or colocation environment. Amazon CloudFront gives customers an improved experience for their end users, including faster content delivery and added cybersecurity protection.

To support the growth in cloud adoption across the region, AWS has made significant investments in education, training, and certification programs to help those interested in the latest cloud computing technologies, best practices, and architectures, to advance their technical skills and further support Middle East organizations in their digital transformation.

AWS offers instructor-led training programs for customers and partners, as well as general public training events such as AWS Summits, AWSome Days, Immersion Days, and Game Days as well as over 500 free online training courses. To help drive diversity in the tech industry, AWS has also extended its global ‘We Power Tech’ program to the region, providing events and free training courses to support technology skills development for women in the Middle East.

For students and educators, the AWS Educate and AWS Academy programs are providing free resources to accelerate cloud-related learning and preparing today’s students in the Middle East for the jobs of the future.

Growing Entrepreneurship in the Middle East

To help grow the next generation of businesses in the Middle East, AWS is supporting startups across the region through the AWS Activate Program. Working with accelerators, angel investors, incubators, government organizations, and Venture Capital firms, AWS Activate provides resources to help startups launch their businesses on AWS and go global in minutes. – TradeArabia News Service