By Vinod Krishnan
Cloud has revolutionized the way businesses operate, especially when it comes to start-ups. It’s uncommon now to find a start-up that isn’t cloud native; most chose to adopt a cloud infrastructure from the beginning. Businesses across the Middle East, such as Careem, Anghami, Boutiqaat, Mrsool and so many more, have been able to grow and innovate quickly, seamlessly underpinned by their highly secure, agile, and flexible cloud infrastructure. Start-ups approach cloud, and more importantly security, with a different viewpoint when compared to larger established organizations who are still struggling to marry together new capabilities with legacy systems.
With the recent launch of the AWS Middle East Region, start-ups the region now have even greater access to advanced and secure technology infrastructure to bring their ideas to life and scale rapidly, safe in the knowledge that security is not an after-thought, but rather the cornerstone of the entire platform of services and infrastructure.
When starting a business, managing costs is critical, therefore investments that deliver the highest possible value and return on investment (ROI) are a must, so start-ups only pay for the services they use. This approach enables them to avoid the large upfront expense of owned infrastructure, and manage their IT at a lower cost than an onpremises environment.
However, low cost does not mean low functionality. To the contrary, a start-up operating on cloud infrastructure has access to the same services and capabilities as the largest enterprise or government customers. This investment includes entire teams dedicated to security that satisfy the security and compliance needs of the most risk-sensitive organizations. This allows them to compete on an even playing field, innovating quickly and bringing products to market, all with the knowledge that they have world-class security in place to protect against the most prevalent threats.
Start-ups are ambitious, tenacious and hungry to expand, so choosing to build and scale their business on the cloud is a natural choice. Simply by embracing cloud, start-ups can scale rapidly, giving them the ability to add or remove resources to meet evolving business demands as required. Instead of investing in data centers, servers and service level agreements, cloud technology allows start-ups to react faster and more flexibly, to experiment, innovate and better serve customers.
The cloud provides an opportunity for start-ups to optimize existing IT systems and to increase operational efficiencies, while driving business agility and growth. This is achieved by allowing companies to significantly decrease the time it takes to provision and de-provision IT infrastructure. While a physical server could take months or weeks to procure and provision, a cloud server takes minutes. Furthermore, cloud technology supports the increasingly rapid pace of product development and the need to swiftly bring products to market.
Start-ups must make security a top priority, regardless of size. A security breach can impact start-ups by hurting their reputation and customer base, and can have repercussions on the larger organizations these businesses do business with. Start-ups need to bake-in security from the ground up to make sure they are not the weak link in a supply chain. An advantage of AWS is that it allows customers to scale and innovate, while maintaining a secure environment.
Time is precious for start-ups and, at AWS, automating security tasks enables start-ups to be more secure by reducing human configuration errors and giving teams more time to work on other tasks critical to the business. Automation can also offer a smarter approach to detecting potential threats through its ability to monitor patterns of behavior. Being able to identify changes in behavior means potential attacks can be identified and dealt with immediately. Applying machine learning and mathematical logic to security also allows the cloud to proactively manage tasks including security assessments, threat detection, and policy management. Using automated reasoning technology, the application of mathematical logic to help answer critical questions about infrastructure, AWS is able to detect entire classes of misconfigurations that could potentially expose vulnerable data. From an early stage, start-ups must choose a cloud provider whose network architecture is designed to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations in the world. At AWS, we believe start-ups are a huge driving force for innovation. However, this wouldn’t be possible without a cloud provider that can support and evolve with them as they grow and that enables them to keep their data safe and protect against malicious attacks.
Report prepared by Strategy& Middle East
Video gaming is an exciting opportunity for telecom operators who can tap into this rapidly growing market and diversify their business using their existing capabilities, according to a new study titled Skin in the Game published by Strategy& Middle East, part of the PwC network.
According to industry data, the gaming industry is now worth a whopping US$129 billion-a-year. That is bigger in terms of revenue than annual worldwide box office, annual music streaming and album sales, and major sports leagues all put together. There are close to 2.5 billion gamers worldwide. “The GCC gaming market has followed the rapid expansion and is expected to hit US$ 821 million by 2021 from US$ 693 million in 2017”, said Hicham Fadel, Partner with Strategy& Middle East. “Global games devised by international developers have so far dominated this regional market. This makes it a particularly attractive proposition for operators in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, where more than half the population is under 25 years of age and there is a strong opportunity to create localized gaming content”, continued Fadel. Telecom operators According to the Strategy& report, GCC telecom operators who successfully enter the gaming industry would improve their brand positioning and increase the loyalty of their customers. Gaming would also increase data usage and bring the welcome extra revenue for telecom operators. Significantly, this would allow telecom operators to generate more data about their customers, which in turn will help improve customer experience and increase monetization.
Telecom operators can reach the next stage by delving deeper into the gaming world cautiously
Telecom operators should stay on the same path make a rash decision, a leap into the unknown, and the result could be bad. There is an alternative, however. A wily gamer knows when to explore a new path. Video gaming represents precisely that alternative approach for telecom operators.
First they should explore distribution of games, and once their gaming ecosphere is operational, GCC operators can begin by localizing simple games at first, or by making games relevant to the local audience. If this resonates with the players, they can then take the next step, develop their own games, and take the fight to global game publishers. Caution is key here – it’s a step-by-step process to gaming greatness and the next level.
In line with the overall global trend, the GCC gaming market has grown. Although the UAE was the largest gaming market in the region in 2018, Saudi Arabia is expected to expand rapidly and become the largest market from 2019 onwards. As elsewhere in the world, the mobile gaming segment in the GCC dominates the region’s gaming market when it comes to revenue and penetration.
Market research indicates that global games devised by international developers have captured the lion’s share of opportunity in the GCC. The top mobile games played in the GCC today are PUBG Mobile, Intikam Al Salatin, Fortnite, and Rise of Kingdoms. However, the demand for localized content remains strong and to an extent unfulfilled. This creates a potential for global players to modify their content to satisfy GCC users, or for GCC users to adapt global content themselves. Indeed, regional players such as gaming studio Falafel Games and Arabic mobile games publisher Tamatem Games have started to emerge through building on their culturally relevant content.
Jad El Mir, Principal with Strategy& Middle East said: “It’s no secret that video games are a global cultural tour-de-force. To fully understand the magnitude of its significance, take the video game Grand Theft Auto V – it achieved seven Guinness World Records after its release in 2013, including a world record for US$1 billion of sales within three days of its launch”. It is therefore no surprise that today online streaming services such as Netflix concede that online games such as Fortnite pose a bigger challenge to them compared to their competitors in the same space. Investments in eSports Another way for telecom operators to associate with gaming is through investment in eSports, which are spectator events in their own right. Operators can launch events and form eSports teams to compete worldwide. It is no surprise that the eSports market is likely to see a substantial boost from its currently low base. The unlocking of sponsorship, advertising, and media rights is projected to increase its annual global revenue to more than $1.7 billion by 2021, around 1 percent of the total gaming market.
Johnny Yaacoub, Manager with Strategy& Middle East said: The opportunity eSports represent is phenomenal, and that is compared to some of the biggest sporting events in the world. Take the example of Kyle Giersdorf, known online as “Bugha”. The gamer won the Fortnite World Cup and took home $3 million – that’s more than the money awarded to the male or female winners of the Wimbledon tennis championship. That’s the scale of this industry”.
According to the Strategy& report, the video gaming industry, just like an actual game, involves multiple, different players. GCC operators need to understand these players so that they can build their own ways to accomplish their quest, and their own ways to unlock achievements in this growing market.
Providing enhanced connectivity through infrastructure is the simplest way to play for operators. It is also the safest and least ambitious. Operators can supply data packages offering better quality of service for gamers, potentially bundled with gaming hardware, content, and online platform subscriptions.
The next stage would involve creating partnerships with leading gaming companies, giving customers access to exclusive game releases or introducing ingame advertisements for the operator’s own products. Such partnerships would also facilitate direct carrier billing for popular games, with users able to carry out in-game purchases through charging payments to their phone bill. As cloud gaming develops, operators are partnering with cloud gaming service providers to distribute their platform. For example, Etisalat joined forces with Gamestream to offer cloud gaming services to its customers.