For years, the main question in the UAE was whether organizations should adopt cloud technology. Today, cloud adoption is no longer up for debate. The focus now is on how to build cloud infrastructure that supports national systems, regulated industries, and long-term economic resilience.
This transition directly supports the UAE Digital Economy Strategy, which aims to increase the digital economy’s contribution to GDP to 20% by 2031, and aligns with the long-term infrastructure vision outlined under UAE Centennial 2071.
As digital platforms expand into areas such as governance, financial services, healthcare, and public services, cloud infrastructure must meet higher, more consistent reliability standards. The UAE’s focus on data sovereignty, regulatory clarity, and digital self-reliance reflects the recognition that data location and governance are critical to building trust in the digital economy.
Government entities, financial institutions, and healthcare providers now expect cloud platforms to meet local data residency requirements, support auditability and regulatory oversight, and deliver consistent performance at scale.
Hosting data locally ensures compliance with frameworks such as the Dubai Government Information Security Regulation (ISR) and Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data.
In healthcare and financial services, latency is a critical operational factor. For example, a surgeon in Abu Dhabi performing a robotic-assisted procedure can be affected by delays of just a few hundred milliseconds if data is routed through overseas servers. These delays could translate to reduced precision during surgery, potentially impacting patient outcomes and increasing healthcare costs. In high-frequency trading, micro-delays can determine the success of a transaction; even a fraction of a second can be worth significant revenue gains or losses. Local infrastructure keeps application traffic within the UAE, enabling faster and more predictable response times.
This approach builds digital self-reliance. Critical systems remain available even if external networks fail, ensuring continuity for institutions that require constant uptime.
"Expanding our data centre footprint in Abu Dhabi and Dubai reflects our approach to long-term investment at Zoho. As cloud adoption deepens across regulated and mission-critical environments, building infrastructure locally becomes essential to earning customer trust. With this, we now support the requirements of governments and enterprises, while delivering the performance and reliability they expect from us.”
- Hyther Nizam, CEO of Zoho Middle East and Africa
These factors are reshaping how organisations in the UAE evaluate cloud platforms. Local data centres simplify compliance, enhance performance, and offer a more resilient foundation as digital workloads grow.
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