How is Alibaba Cloud Empowering the Cloud Business in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

One of the top cloud vendors worldwide, Alibaba Cloud enters the Saudi market through a joint venture company called Saudi Cloud Computing Company (SCCC). This joint venture with an initial capital investment of 894 Million SAR ($238 Million USD) is a collaboration between several Saudi companies namely STC Group, eWTP, Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), Saudi Information Technology Company (SITE), and Alibaba Cloud. SCC will offer cutting-edge cloud computing services to meet the growing demand by businesses and government entities. This initiative will accelerate the kingdom’s digital transformation and provide the necessary digital infrastructure.

Vision 2030

The Kingdom is heavily investing in the technology sector in line with its aims to diversify the economy. SCCC will play a crucial role in accelerating digital transformation by providing hyper-scale cloud services.

As cloud services become easily accessible to the local market, they foster a growth environment where businesses and organizations focus on their business growth and remove the burden of traditional on-premises solutions and IT management; further, cloud adoption reduces projects and products launch periods from years or months to weeks or even days.

This technological advancement will revolutionize the information and communication technology sector by introducing a new class of services to the local market, creating job opportunities, and attracting both local and global talents. Not only that but such development will benefit other sectors such as health, education, tourism, and transportation to name a few.

How Saudi Arabia Will Be Empowered With This Move?

The benefits of cloud computing are numerous, ranging from cost savings to enhanced performance and a smaller carbon footprint.

●?????Huge cost savings

Because businesses no longer need to buy, operate, and maintain on-site servers and equipment, and because they only pay cloud providers for the services they really utilize, cloud computing can drastically save expenses.

●?????Increased Security

Security is a key component of all the services and solutions that cloud providers and data center operators offer. They will have much more sophisticated and reliable security safeguards than a normal internal system a company might typically utilize. Data traveling through cloud networks and being kept in data centers is encrypted, making it far more difficult for unauthorized users to access.

●?????Increased Adaptability

Cloud computing technology enables businesses to be more agile and respond quickly to emerging business needs. Not only are corporate operations more efficient as a result, but maybe more significantly, a competitive edge is achieved.

●?????Collaborative Decentralization

Cloud services make it simple for employees around the company to collaborate, regardless of where they are situated. The cloud environment eliminates traditional obstacles like the requirement that everyone collaborates in one central area by making every document, file, and program available on-demand. This can increase productivity and increase staff retention by allowing for flexible work schedules.

●?????Higher Scalability

When a firm needs more storage, processing power, or virtual resources, cloud computing offers unparalleled scalability. Businesses can scale up or down fast, conveniently, and affordably because they only pay for the resources they actually utilize.

●?????Environmental Efficiency

The energy efficiency of data centers is a top priority. This not only lowers operational expenses but also allows companies using cloud services housed in data centers to operate more sustainably and show their commitment to the environment by lowering their carbon footprints.

●?????Increased performance

Businesses' productivity is increased thanks to the agility that cloud computing offers thanks to faster apps, less downtime, and optimal performance even under stress.

●?????Disaster Recovery

To avoid downtime and the loss of important data and applications, businesses turn to disaster recovery solutions, but setting up traditional disaster recovery programs may be expensive and difficult. Because cloud computing effectively mirrors stored data across multiple servers, it enables businesses to access backup servers in the event that the primary server fails. This makes disaster recovery easier and more cost-effective.

What Services Are Included?

Here is a list of services that are available on alibabacloud.sa (Alibaba Cloud Saudi Arabia):

Compute Services:

●?????Elastic Compute Service (ECS) : One of the most popular services on the Alibaba platform is the Elastic Compute Service or ECS. It means one can deploy virtual servers inside of the Alibaba Cloud environment. The majority of individuals need an ECS Instance for operating in their environment as a component of at least one of their solutions.

●?????Auto Scaling (ESS) : A cloud computing technology called autoscaling enables businesses to automatically scale cloud services like server capacity or virtual machines up or down in response to predefined conditions like traffic or utilization levels.

●?????Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK): One of the first services to complete the Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program is Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK). High-performance management services are offered by ACK for containerized applications. Enterprise-level containerized applications can be managed at all stages of the application lifecycle.

●????? Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) : Resource orchestration describes the procedures for organizing a company's resource portfolio, grouping resources into capabilities, and utilizing capability configurations to produce different organizational outputs.

●?????Server Migration Center SMC: Alibaba Cloud created the server migration platform known as Server Migration Center (SMC). You can move one or more source servers to Alibaba Cloud using SMC. Servers in self-managed data centers, virtual machines (VMs), third-party cloud servers, or servers of other kinds can all function as source servers.

●?????Cloud ECS GPU (EGS): Cloud Graphics Units (GPUs) are instances of computers with powerful hardware acceleration that are useful for running cloud-based applications to manage computation-heavy AI and deep learning workloads.

Storage devices:

●?????Object Storage (OSS) : Alibaba Cloud offers Object Storage Service (OSS), a highly reliable, cost-efficient, and secure cloud storage service. You can use it to store a lot of data in the cloud. The OSS is built for data durability of 99.9999999999 percent (twelve nines) and service availability of 99.995 percent.

●?????File Storage NAS : The file-level storage architecture known as network-attached storage (NAS) increases the accessibility of stored data to networked devices. Along with storage area networks (SAN) and direct-attached storage, NAS is one of the three basic storage topologies (DAS).

●?????Log Service (SLS) : A cloud-native observation and analysis platform called Log Service offers large-scale, affordable, and immediate services to handle various sorts of data, including logs, metrics, and traces. One can gather, transform, query, analyze, visualize, ship, and consume data with Log Service.

●?????Tablestore : Alibaba Cloud created the storage service called Tablestore. it enables quick data query and analytics while storing a significant amount of structured data utilizing many models.

●?????Block Storage (EBS): Elastic Block Store is a block-storage service created for Elastic Compute Cloud that is simple to use, scalable, and high-performance.

Network services

●?????NAT Gateway : A Network Address Translation (NAT) service is a NAT gateway. Instances in a private subnet can connect to services outside your VPC using a NAT gateway, but external services cannot connect directly to those instances.

●?????Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): A private cloud computing environment housed inside of a public cloud is known as a virtual private cloud (VPC). A VPC basically creates logically segregated areas of a public cloud to offer a virtual private environment.

●?????Elastic IP Address (EIP) : Up until you decide to release it, you can assign an Elastic IP address to any EC2 instance running in a certain area. See Allocate an Elastic IP address to assign an Elastic IP address to your account in a specific region.

●?????Server Load Balancer (SLB) : SLB (Server Load Balancing) is a system that uses network-based hardware or software-defined appliances to distribute heavy traffic websites across multiple servers. Global server load balancing is the term used to describe the intelligent allocation of traffic while load balancing across several geolocations (GSLB).

●?????Express Connect : Between your data center and a virtual private cloud, Express Connect enables you to create a quick, dependable, secure, and private connection (VPC). Express Connect circuits provide safe data transfer, eliminate network jitter, and lessen the risk of data breaches.

Security services

●?????Security Center : A centralized security management system called Security Center dynamically finds and analyses security threats, and when threats are found, notifications are generated. To guarantee the security of servers in data centers and cloud resources, Security Center offers a number of capabilities.

●?????Action Trail : The Alibaba Cloud account is monitored and recorded by the service ActionTrail. The operations include your usage of the Alibaba Cloud Management Console, APIs, and SDKs to access and utilize cloud services.

●?????SSL Certificates Service: SSL Certificates are short data files that link an organization's information and a cryptographic key digitally. It activates the HTTPS protocol and the padlock when installed on a web server, enabling secure communications from a web server to a browser.

Database services

●?????Apsaradb RDS for Mysql: Based on the Apsara Distributed File System and Alibaba Cloud's high-performance SSDs, ApsaraDB RDS provides a dependable, scalable, and stable online database solution. The MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB TX database engines are all supported by ApsaraDB RDS.

●?????Apsaradb-for-Redis : The enterprise version of Tair, which is fully compatible with Redis and supports primary-secondary, clustering, and read-write separation architectures, as well as low latency, high throughput, and elastic scalability, as well as real-time diagnostic capabilities for large hotkeys, are both included in ApsaraDB for Redis.

●?????ApsaraDB for PostgreSQL : The "most sophisticated open source database in the world," PostgreSQL allows OLTP databases to process GIS data and execute enterprise-level SQL expressions. It also supports NoSQL data types like JSON, XML, and hstore.

●?????Data Autonomy Service(DAS): An autonomous database is a cloud-based database that employs machine learning to automate administrative duties including database tuning, security, backups, and updates that were previously handled by DBAs. An autonomous database, as opposed to a traditional database, handles all of these activities and more automatically.

Operations & Maintenance Services

●?????CloudMonitor (CMS): Enterprise-class monitoring is offered by CloudMonitor as a one-stop shop. By utilizing events and custom metrics, CloudMonitor provides the monitoring of IT infrastructure as well as dial testing-based Internet quality monitoring.

●?????DirectMail: Without having to create your own email server, DirectMail is a quick and simple tool for sending bulk emails and email notifications.

Other services

●?????APIGateway: An API gateway tool known as an API gateway sits in between a client and a group of backend services. An API gateway serves as a reverse proxy to receive all application programming interface (API) requests, collect all necessary services, and deliver the desired outcome.

●?????Alibaba Cloud DNS : Alibaba Cloud DNS is an intelligent domain name resolution service offered by the HiChina DNS (Domain Name Service) system designed to upgrade domain names across the network. It can resolve non-HiChina domain names to foreign IP addresses and offers stable, secure, and quick domain name resolution capabilities.

●?????Resource Access Management (RAM): Alibaba Cloud offers Resource Access Management (RAM) as a service. You may control user identities and resource access permissions with it.

Summary

The Saudi Cloud Computing Company will provide world-class cloud services to local businesses and government entities and contribute to the Kingdom’s digital infrastructure. Hence, transforming the Information and Communication Technology sector alongside other sectors such as health, education, tourism, transportation, and many others. This advancement will result in compound benefits and bring the Kingdom closer to its 2030 vision.