Henri Kassab, MD International Wholesale and Roaming at Zain Group shakes hands with Victor Bishay MENA-Enterprise lead for AWS.

KUWAIT CITY, March 8: Zain Group, a leading mobile telecom innovator in eight countries across the Middle East and Africa, announces that through its fully owned global services subsidiary, Mada Communications, it 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 announcement was made on the occasion of the Capacity Middle East Conference being held in Dubai this week. Becoming a member of the APN means Zain can now connect enterprises directly to the AWS Cloud across its expansive 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. For 10 years, AWS has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. 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. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world monthly — including the fastest growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs.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. Commenting on the landmark agreement with AWS, Henri Kassab, MD, International, Wholesale & Roaming at Zain Group said, “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.”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.The agreement of adding AWS to the portfolio 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.Entering arrangements with leading cloud and connectivity players, such as AWS and Microsoft, is reaffirming Zain’s leadership as an international wholesale connectivity services provider, and builds on the company’s overall strategy of being at the cutting edge of innovation and improved customer experience. Zain’s state-of-the art owned and operated, resilient IP/MPLS network spans the Middle East, Europe, the Far East and the US, connecting through network-to-network interface (NNI) arrangements with major world partners. Through working with AWS, Zain will now be able to offer connections for its corporate users to one of the world’s industry-leading cloud platforms.