Zain Group, a leading mobile telecom innovator in eight countries across the Middle East and Africa has become the first telco group in the region to become an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect partner on the Amazon Partner Network (APN).
The agreement follows a similar deal reached by Zain last September where the company announced it had been granted Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Program status, permitting it to deliver innovative Microsoft software and cloud experiences to enterprises across its IP/MPLS network.
Becoming a member of the APN means Zain can now connect enterprises directly to the AWS Cloud across its IP/MPLS network. This launch will see Zain establish network circuits between AWS Direct Connect locations and customer datacenters, offices, or colocation environments, assisting enterprises to construct a hybrid cloud environment, using the AWS Cloud.
AWS offers over 90 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and enterprise applications from 42 Availability Zones (AZs) across 16 geographic regions worldwide with another 2 AWS regions (and 5 Availability Zones) in France and China expected to come online in the coming months.
This announcement builds on Zain’s Cloud Connect offering, which provides an innovative platform that connects customers and different cloud service providers (CSP) in a simple and cost-effective way. The platform enables customers to build flexible and scalable hybrid cloud-based solutions, and provides customers with the easiest way to connect to different, leading cloud service providers, such as AWS.
With Zain Cloud Connect, corporate customers have dedicated bandwidth over fully managed infrastructure, providing predictable performance, latency and better security as compared to Internet-based connectivity. The service also offers strong end-to-end control over routing and the number of routing hops, with data sovereignty and end-to-end security concerns being comprehensively addressed, said the Operator.
Henri Kassab, MD, International, Wholesale & Roaming, Zain Group
This is a major development for Zain as we register another first for the region with the addition of Amazon Web Services to our portfolio. We will continue to innovate in a bid to provide our corporate clients with the best and most differentiated offerings available.
