When we talk about Cybersecurity, what are the geographic regions that you think of? On the good side, it is the United States and the European Union. Of course, on the Dark Side are the nation state actors such as those of Russia, China, and North Korea.
But as I have been writing throughout the year, it seems
like that the Middle East is now becoming the ripe opportunity for Cyber
related projects, especially when it comes to Cloud deployments, such as those
of the AWS and Azure.
So, why is the Middle East becoming so popular now? Well, this region has traditionally been
known to be ultra conservative. Keep in
mind that the countries I am primarily talking about are Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, etc.
The governments of these nations hold very closely to their
chest the PII datasets of their citizens.
This was the way for the longest time, until the COVID-19 Pandemic
hit. With everybody on lock down, the only
way for people to conduct businesses and daily job tasks was through video conferencing
and the other usual means of electronic communications.
Of course, the governments of these countries just mentioned
did not want to miss out on any opportunities during this time period, so they
eased up quite a bit on the restrictions.
Now they are starting to realize that using the Cloud for large scale
computing is the wave of the future. The
drivers for this are:
*AI and ML, and everything that comes with it
*The Internet of Things (IoT)
*The 5 G Wireless Network
*Cybersecurity in general
(SOURCE: https://www.blueweaveconsulting.com/report/middle-east-public-cloud-market-report)
Also, given the huge explosion of AI and ML this year, data
centers are now becoming a big thing in this part of the world, with the United
Arab Emirates (UAE) signing up deals with Azure AWS, GCP, and even Ali Baba,
based in China.
Also, Saudi Arabia just launched its first data center, giving
yet another dedicated home to the GCP (Google Cloud Platform). Soon, they will be expanding to have data centers
that host Oracle and SAP. And Qatar is
also expanding into the datacenter footprint as well, by having on premises
hosting for both the CGP and Azure.
But despite the huge growth and interest, there is still strong
concern among more conservative Middle Easterners about data sharing, and it will
be made private. Another big concern are
those of the data leakages that still do occur, whether they are intentional or
not. But it is highly expected that the sheer
benefits of Cloud deployments will far outweigh these concerns in the end.
My Thoughts On This:
It is obvious that this explosion in the Middle East is
going to continue for a long time to come.
While other markets may soon reach their maturation point, these countries
still have a long time to go until they ever reach that point. Also, the trend is still continuing to grow
as well where other IT vendors and telecoms are forging other kinds of partnerships
with the major Cloud providers.
Some of these include:
*The Core 42 based out of Abu Dhabi
*The Snowflake based in the UAE
(https://www.snowflake.com/blog/cloud-deployment-region-uae-launch/)
*The Moro Hub based in Qatar
Finally, more details about other Cloud based opportunities
can be seen in the link below:
https://www.darkreading.com/dr-global/the-gulfs-dizzying-tech-ambitions-present-risk-opportunity
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