UAE-based engineering services company, Adfolks LLC has witnessed a 300 percent rise in cloud consumption by companies in the UAE and wider GCC region since 2020.
The company observes that Chief Information Officers (CIOs) have begun to leverage the power of the cloud for better efficiency, security, and faster return on investments.
The latest forecast by global technology research and consulting giant Gartner, the end-user expenditure on public cloud services in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will total $5.7 billion in 2022.
Over the last 5 years, Adfolks has been supporting 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.
Arun Mohan CEO – Adfolks
“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.”
Adfolks closely works with CIOs to plot their digital transformation journey and concentrates 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 $20 billion over the next five years in cybersecurity, quadrupling its previous annual investment,” Ms. Yvonne Chebib, Global Partner Solutions Lead, Microsoft UAE remarked.
The Move to the Cloud
Organizations across the MENA region have begun migrating their on-premises IT infrastructure deployments to SaaS, IaaS and PaaS cloud environments. Some of the benefits of this shift include anywhere-anytime access, infrastructure flexibility, scalability, cost reduction, rapid deployment, and faster time to market.
Savings arising due to this change in strategy are eventually routed back into the local economy, thereby making a significant contribution to the country’s digital economy.
Sharing his comment on the advantages of Cloud framework, Mr. Binoo Joseph, CTO Emaar Technologies stated that, “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 optimizations, 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 organizations had one unified office with all employees in one place. With decentralization, the boundaries of the organization 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 Mr. Mohan.
Adfolks
The homegrown tech firm’s services broadly fall under four categories that include Cloud Migration, Cloud-Native App and Infra – DevOps, API management solutions, middleware modernization; data science and engineering in addition to AI Ops and observability.
