UAE-based BIOS Middle East expands to Saudi Arabia with two cloud data centres

Dubai-based cloud and managed IT services provider Bios Middle East has established two new cloud data centres in Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

The cloud data centres were built out in late 2020 using the VMware cloud stack which has been the core of Bios’ UAE offerings in Dubai and Abu Dhabi since 2013. BIOS also says it has already onboarded its first set of customers, providing it with ready reference accounts in financial services and healthcare sectors.

The two new cloud zones will allow companies in the kingdom to store all their data within the borders of the country, which addresses data residency requirements for regulated sectors.

Saudi Arabia’s cloud services market is estimated at $10bn, according to Aramco. In 2019, the Kingdom launched its ‘cloud-first’ policy to encourage public sector migration from traditional IT platforms to cloud-based models. The policy aims to help Saudi organisations improve efficiency, enhance agility and reliability, strengthen cybersecurity and promote innovation to achieve the goals of the Saudi Vision 2030 programme.

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“Cloud services are essential to unlocking the benefits of digital transformation, which has been identified as a major strategic plank for Saudi Arabian organisations in line with Saudi Vision 2030,” said Dominic Docherty, managing director, Bios Middle East.

“We started getting so many requests for cloud services in KSA, both from our UAE customers wanting to expand and from inbound leads that it became an obvious step for us to take. So far the response has been beyond our expectations and we are excited to invest and grow more in the Kingdom,” he added.

Bios Middle East, a Gartner recognised vendor, will offer infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) to customers in the Middle East. The company provides managed services and cloud solutions with round the clock support for a fixed monthly fee.