Mobily launches Saudi computing ‘cloud’

Mobily launches Saudi computing ‘cloud’

Company aims to utilize infrastructure in a more ‘green IT’ manner.

June 27, 2010 2:05 by Samuel Potter

Mobily, Saudi Arabia’s leading mobile operator, has this weekend launched an advanced cloud computing environment, the first of a series of clouds the organization will roll out in the coming few months to maximize the utilization of its infrastructure in a more Green IT, environmentally friendly manner.

Cloud is a generic term used by IT professionals to describe the Internet. When coupled with computing, it gains wider meaning: The availability of applications, platforms and infrastructure on the fly. Cloud computing offers organizations IT resources in a cost effective, scalable, reliable and fault tolerant manner. In addition to faster provisioning, cloud computing gives organizations easier management and monitoring of their IT resource management. This is what Mobily has gained with its first cloud computing setup, which has resulted in a major cut in time to market, the company said.

“A year ago, we conducted a careful audit of our internal computing needs and those of our business customers, then we consolidated each of them and started our first cloud computing initiative inside Mobily,” said Mobily’s Chief Information Officer Medhat S. Amer. “Today, a significant portion of our internal computing needs have been addressed with the launch of our first computing cloud without any additional investment in physical computing resources,” he added.

Focusing on the efficiency of cloud computing, Ahmed Altheneyan, vice president IT operations, said: “When a project needs computing resources, they can be allocated and provisioned in less than 15 minutes using our computing cloud.”

Mobily has plans to roll out subsequent computing clouds for its internal computing and storage needs. “By adopting a cloud computing approach to IT and networking needs, we have efficient utilization of our current resources, which in turn translates itself into cost savings for us,” said Altheneyan. “We can take those cost savings back to the customer and provide them with affordable services, without compromise on quality.”

Among successful cloud computing examples are Google’s apps engine, Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Microsoft’s Windows Live platform, salesforce.com’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) cloud, and Rackspace’s cloud-based computing and hosting solutions.

- Arab News