Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the US tech mogul, will always make security its number one investment area, the Amazon CTO said on Wednesday.
In a keynote speech delivered to the AWS Summit in Dubai, Werner Vogels highlighted the growing role of AWS in the Middle East and North Africa, and said the division aims to continue its dynamic presence in emerging countries in the region.
Vogels spoke about security, saying it was the priority of customers who rely on cloud computing.
“The kind of threats we see is continuously evolving,” said Vogels, who also embraced the online multiplayer phenomenon game Fortnite shirt in front of over 2,500 participants and AWS customers.
“We all need to take responsibility in security and only then we will be able to deal with the current modern threats,” he said.
AWS s cloud computing platform, a growing home for hundreds of thousands of customers and entrepreneurs, offers on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform, with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Vogels also spoke about the importance of a direct relationship between AWS and customers, saying that 95 percent of delivery sales came from this belief.
“The biggest reason for [the growing customer base] is that we are strongly connected to our customers,” he said.
AWS s cloud-based products including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, and developer tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise applications.
He also talked about the upcoming Middle East Infrastructure Region, which will see Bahrain as its home, and is set to be inaugurated soon.
The Infrastructure Region will be the 22nd AWS region worldwide, with an existing 44 Availability Zones across 16 geographic regions.
A number of growing businesses from the region, including Careem and Anghami, also spoke about their experience with AWS s products at the event.
Co-founder and Chief Xperience Officer at booming Dubai-based ride-hailing service Careem Magnus Olsson said it has used a number of AWS services since its launch in 2012.
It has now reached 30 million customers and 1 million drivers across 120 cities in 15 countries.
According to Olsson, Careem, which was recently acquired by US ride-hailing mammoth Uber in a deal worth $3.1 billion, leveraged its artificial intelligence from 2017 to now through Amazon RDS, Amazon ElasticSearch, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon S3.
Careem is scaled to support 10 times the annual growth for the next three years in a row, and is able to focus on building and operating its applications through cooperation with AWS, according to the division s website.
Elie Habib, co-founder of Anghami, a popular music streaming hub across the Arab world, also shared the platform s experience with AWS.
“We didn t have any experience about cloud [products] until we got to move everything into the cloud in a month,” Habib said.
According to Habib, reliability was the main challenge for the hub, launched in 2011, as traffic spiked on ads and new music releases, with the company seeking to log all interactions.
He said that scaling the app though AWS has helped traffic grow beyond Anghami s “wildest dreams.”
“We currently have 75 million users, with 1.7 million subscribed users; those are my favourite,” he said.
He also pointed to the platform s hosting of the first episode of the new season of global television phenomenon Game of Thrones earlier this week.
