Etisalat has announced the launch of ‘Cloud Compute’ (Infrastructure as a Service), the first cloud service offering in UAE for SMBs and enterprises providing a pay as you go model, reducing IT costs upto 60 per cent and time to market faster by up to 90 per cent.

The spending on cloud services is expected to increase compared to other areas in the IT marketplace. In the Mena region, growth is expected to be around 20.2 per cent through 2016, according to analysts at Gartner.

Etisalat new cloud service addresses this growth in the country by providing an on-demand subscription to a pool of configurable computing resources that can be shared or private.

They are suitable for corporate, enterprise, private, public and government sectors. Etisalat Cloud Compute offers easy access to infrastructure, ability to scale up or down rapidly based on demand and faster time to market than conventional hosting services.

The new service is built on hitech infrastructure that includes servers, storage, applications and services hosted at the Etisalat Jebel Ali data center, which is Tier III design certified by the Uptime Institute providing secure reliable and hosting environment.

Abdulla Hashim, the senior VP, ICT, Etisalat said more and more enterprises are today adopting cloud computing as CIOs realize the strategic implications of the cloud-specifically how it is dramatically changing the IT department’s relationship with the business as a whole.

"The mature adopters understand that enterprise cloud computing will help them evolve from delivering ‘IT as usual’ to ‘IT as eagerly anticipated’," he explained.

Etisalat, said Hashim, works closely with these enterprises and realizes that these organisations want to leverage on cloud’s ever-expandable and always available infrastructure to speed the delivery and reliability of new and existing applications.

IaaS is the new model of business computing whereby clients do not need to spend on CAPEX and manage challenges faced for time to market of their products and services.”

Etisalat currently offers three different cloud Compute models - Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. The new compute capacity aligns closely with business needs thereby provisioning times that have drastically cut down lead times for delivery of IT infrastructure.

Cloud services are also accompanied with the benefits of disaster recovery and high availability thereby ensuring business continuity.-TradeArabia News Service