Amazon Web Services to open Middle East data centres by 2019

Amazon Web Services is due to build new infrastructure and open data centres in the Middle East by early 2019, enabling customers to offer lower-latency web services in the region.

Amazon said that the new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region will consist of three ‘Availability Zones’ at launch, and added it will launch an AWS Edge Network Location in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the first quarter of 2018.

“As countries in the Middle East look to transform their economies for generations to come, technology will play a major role, and the cloud will be in the middle of that transformation,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services.

The move was welcomed by Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), which already uses Amazon Web Services to deliver content in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

“AWS has been critical in our digital transformation initiatives,” said Joe Igoe, MBC’s group director of technical operations. “Knowing we will have AWS infrastructure close to our viewers is invaluable for us.”

“AWS has helped us speed up innovation and rapidly expand into a wider range of scalable and reliable digital services, such as our Video on Demand platform, Shahid.net.

“During the holy month of Ramadan, TV viewership spikes dramatically. This year, we successfully scaled our online platform to support a massive increase in traffic and delivered hundreds of thousands of concurrent video streams and dozens of petabytes of content to our viewers.”

The chief executive of the Bahrain Economic Development Board, Khalid Al Rumaih said: “AWS’s commitment to expanding its presence into the MENA region, from Bahrain, is a major enabler for technology and data-driven business across the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council). This will benefit global corporates, SMEs, entrepreneurs, and governments alike.”