Adfolks, a UAE-based engineering services company, has announced that it has seen a 300% increase in cloud consumption by companies in the UAE and wider GCC region since 2020. CIOs have started to leverage the power of cloud for better efficiency, security, and faster return on investments. According to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc., the end-user spending on public cloud services in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will total US$ 5.7 billion in 2022. Adfolks LLC, a 5-year-old tech venture supports digitally forward-thinking enterprises including Dubai Airports, DP World, Mashreq, EMAAR, Arab National Bank among several others to deliver market differentiation through smart technology solutions powered by cloud-based technologies.
“We have constantly generated awareness on the importance of cloud adoption within the tech community in the UAE. The potential of cloud is massive and based on our own findings, currently, CIOs in the region have just skimmed the surface. We strongly believe that organisations in GCC can immensely benefit and race towards a positive ROI by utilizing the power of cloud. We frequently run cloud assessment modules for enterprises on their legacy systems and help them make informed decisions on integrating cloud within their IT strategy. Adfolks over the years has enabled the CIOs in GCC to put a roadmap with immediate and long-term goals by adjusting the variables as per the need, for instance, scale, cost and licensing,” said Arun Mohan, CEO of Adfolks.
The company works closely with CIOs to chart their digital transformation journey and focuses on building internal capabilities around upcoming tech trends. These areas are prudently chosen with close collaboration with platform providers in the cloud space.
“When Microsoft started providing Azure cloud services in the region, cloud wasn’t a core component in the IT strategy for most enterprises. Skillsets in the market for all aspects starting with advocacy, training, consulting, and actual delivery, and managed service were limited in the early days. With cloud adoption gaining momentum in the region, the case for digital transformation has never been more urgent. Strategic partners like Adfolks LLC not only bring together the power of Azure with their services and infrastructure expertise but also help enterprises in the region develop resilience and transformation while ensuring stringent compliance and regulatory guidelines. Microsoft has pledged to invest USD 20 billion over the next five years in cybersecurity, quadrupling its previous annual investment,” said Yvonne Chebib, Global Partner Solutions Lead, Microsoft UAE.
Organisations in the MENA region have started migrating their on-premises IT infrastructure deployments to SaaS, IaaS and PaaS cloud environments. Some of the benefits of this migration include anywhere-anytime access, infrastructure flexibility, scalability, cost reduction, rapid deployment, and faster time to market. Savings arising due to this migration are eventually routed back into the local economy, thereby making a significant contribution to the country’s digital economy.
Commenting on the benefits of Cloud framework, Binoo Joseph, CTO Emaar Technologies said, “In FY21, Adfolks enhanced our cloud usage by positioning Azure DevOps as the starting point where their team supported our developers with development releases. With a fully integrated Azure DevSecOps solution, we were able to reduce the time to market from days to hours. What took at least 3-4 days for approvals and optimisations, now was done in a matter of less than 3-4 hours by also reducing pentest timelines. Re-platforming a business-critical application that came with a heavy load of pictures and multiple tiers of user-based access, using Microservices and AKS, was the next step, that helped us achieve commendable scalability and great stability. We were also able to cut down on massive on-premises costs by embracing Azure”.
Prior to the pandemic, the organisations had one unified office with all employees in one place. With decentralisation, the boundaries of the organisation have become ambiguous. Data is all over the place, demanding a need for a comprehensive and consolidated security strategy including a strong cloud framework.
“Employees in the MENA region during this phase also were demanding an ‘anytime-anywhere-on-any-device’ service. This has triggered the need for secure cloud platforms, and we have been able to support companies in the region to use digital services that are more secure than ever before especially during the pandemic,” concluded Mohan.
This home-grown tech firm’s services broadly fall under four categories that include Cloud Migration; Cloud-Native App and Infra – DevOps, API management solutions, middleware modernisation; data science and engineering in addition to AI Ops and observability.
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