New pay-as-you-go cloud arrives in UAE for SMEs

Etisalat currently offers three different cloud Compute models

The new pay-as-you-go service called Cloud Compute was announced yesterday.

Etisalat, a telecom operator in the Middle East and Africa, today announced the launch of its newester service Cloud Compute. According to a media statement, "this is the first cloud service to be offered in UAE for [SMEs] providing a pay as you go model, reducing IT costs up to 60 per cent and time to market faster by up to 90 per cent."

"The spending on cloud services is expected to increase compared to other areas in the IT marketplace," said the statement. In the Middle East and North Africa region, growth is expected to be around 20.2 per cent through 2016, according to analysts at Gartner.

"Etisalat new cloud service addresses this growth in the country by providing an on-demand subscription to a pool of configurable computing resources that can be shared or private. They are suitable for corporate, enterprise, private, public and government sectors. Etisalat Cloud Compute offers easy access to infrastructure, ability to scale up or down rapidly based on demand and faster time to market than conventional hosting services." the statement continued.

"The Etisalat Cloud Compute is built on a state of the art infrastructure that includes servers, storage, applications and services hosted at the Etisalat Jebel Ali data center, which is Tier III design certified by the Uptime Institute providingsecure reliable and state of the art hosting environment."

Abdulla Hashim, Senior Vice President, ICT, Etisalat said, "Enterprises today are adopting cloud computing as CIOs realize the strategic implications of the cloud-specifically how it is dramatically changing the IT department's relationship with the business as a whole. The mature adopters understand that enterprise cloud computing will help them evolve from delivering 'IT as usual' to 'IT as eagerly anticipated'.

"Etisalat works closely with these enterprises and realizes that these organisations want to leverage on cloud's ever-expandable and always available infrastructure to speed the delivery and reliability of new and existing applications. IaaS is the new model of business computing whereby clients do not need to spend on CAPEX and manage challenges faced for time to market of their products and services."

Etisalat currently offers three different cloud Compute models: Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. "The new compute capacity aligns closely with business needs thereby provisioning times that have drastically cut down lead times for delivery of IT infrastructure. Cloud services are also accompanied with the benefits of disaster recovery and high availability thereby ensuring business continuity," said the statement.