By Sebastian Shi – Managing Director of Huawei Cloud, United Arab Emirates
As digital economy grows, companies across the Middle East are significantly increasing their investments in digital transformation. A recent survey shows that more than 80% of firms in the region aim to boost their digital budgets this year, highlighting the Middle East’s firm dedication to adopting new technologies. At the heart of this shift is cloud computing. As a crucial driver of modernisation, cloud technology—empowered by cutting-edge AI—allows businesses to access data, software, and computing power from any location globally, all with exceptional efficiency.
Huawei Cloud, through our “Everything-as-a-Service” approach, emerges as a leading force in this sector, offering a wide range of cloud solutions that are customer-centric, accelerating business innovation, promoting global connectivity, and building a cohesive digital ecosystem.
Cloud-based infrastructure has been crucial in supporting large-scale government initiatives across the region. By offering a complete ecosystem of digital solutions, cloud services are helping businesses scale rapidly, enhance customer experiences, and streamline service delivery. Huawei, for instance, is supporting 200 government customers across the MEA region as part of efforts to build robust public infrastructure. Huawei has built national government cloud for countries such as Uzbekistan, Oman, and Egypt. We also provide a wide range of public cloud services for governments and businesses through our Riyadh region.
A Perceptive, Intelligent, and Safe E-government
Huawei Cloud provides consultancy and technology in constructing national government clouds, enabling the efficient implementation of future cities that are perceptive, intelligent, and safe. Through Huawei Cloud Stack, we are creating and developing e-government data processing centers, as well as developing and implementing cross-departmental information systems and central databases, ensuring a unified technological approach in the implementation of e-government and digital economy projects. In Uzbekistan, Huawei Cloud helps the Uzbek government build a solid cloud foundation to support digital development, serving a population of 37 million and covering more than 400 public services.
Bridging Technology and Business Needs
One of the cloud’s key functions is its capacity to serve as a bridge, linking businesses across regions and economies to an ever-expanding digital ecosystem. As cloud technology continues to grow, industries throughout the Middle East are benefiting from a new wave of innovative, secure, and efficient digital solutions that are customized to meet the unique needs of their sectors.
For carriers, Huawei Cloud helps them migrate their applications to the cloud, improving efficiency and enabling light-asset operations. Additionally, carriers can rapidly innovate with new business-to-business models on Huawei Cloud, empowering them to offer more dynamic services to their customers.
For e-commerce and retail, Huawei Cloud, through its cloud native, big data, and media solutions, empowers clients to uplift performance during peak seasons with refined operations and innovative models to drive new growth. JCTop’s e-commerce platform Wing Go collaborates with Huawei Cloud to redefine the online shopping and entertainment experience for users through cloud-native 2.0 services and low-latency live streaming (LLL). Based on the cloud-native 2.0 architecture, the product iteration cycle has been reduced from several months to 10-15 days, while providing users with an exceptional online shopping experience with live streaming latency of less than 1 second.
For education, we build a national education cloud for Advanced National Research and Education Network in UAE (Ankabut), the largest ICT service provider in the education industry, providing more than 10 education applications and more than 40 cloud services for 120+ universities and educational institutions, greatly improving education digitalization and help Ankabut become a leading provider of education and research cloud services in the UAE and globally.
In media & entertainment, STARZPLAY – the top 2 OTT platform in the Middle East, faces several challenges such as complex O&M due to multiple operating environments on the service system, unpredictable resource usage and high costs upon traffic surges, and high latency that hinders OTT transformation and business growth. They chose Huawei Cloud to reconstruct the serverless architecture in full-stack and simplify O&M. During the Cricket World Cup, STARZPLAY easily copes with the traffic peak in the finals, ensuring smooth and stable viewing experience for 3.2+ million paid users anytime and anywhere, due the global presence of Huawei Cloud CDN.
In web3, leading Web3 clients in the Middle East has chosen to migrate their core trading system on Huawei Cloud. Huawei Cloud’s cloud-native database, Qingtian Enclave wallet, and security compliance solutions provide encryption asset protection and a seamless high-frequency trading experience for millions of Web3 users. In UAE, we have helped several cryptocurrency exchange platform such as UPTX to resolve pain points regarding databases, middleware and container through smooth migration at a 30% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with our full-stack elastic architecture solution, ensuring smooth and reliable trading experiences, as well as timely order executions during traffic spikes.
Empowering SMBs
Migrating to the cloud is a critical decision for businesses, with choosing a better cloud being the top priority. However, for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), startups, and entry-level developers, this decision can be particularly difficult due to high initial costs, deployment challenges, and the ongoing expenses associated with maintaining and operating cloud servers.
In response to these challenges, we introduced the Huawei Cloud Flexus, including Flexus X Instance, Flexus L instance, and Flexus RDS. Huawei Cloud Flexus provides high flexibility with more than 100 custom specifications based on business demands with compute upgrade on the fly, and is the industry first cloud server to support live migration on the public cloud without disrupting ongoing services.
Cloud for Future Growth and Evolution
As cloud technology continues to revolutionise industries across the Middle East, the region stands poised for a future of exponential growth and transformation. The Middle East’s commitment to digital innovation is accelerating the shift toward more efficient, secure, and customer-centric business models. From empowering governments with national cloud infrastructures to enabling SMBs and startups to thrive in the digital age, cloud technology is the backbone of this ongoing evolution.
Looking forward, cloud adoption will remain a key enabler of future growth, connecting governments and businesses across the region. Huawei Cloud is committed to supporting this transformation, offering flexible, secure, and cutting-edge solutions that empower businesses to innovate, scale, and succeed. As the digital economy continues to evolve, the cloud will be at the heart of the Middle East’s next wave of economic and technological progress.
