Dubai Airport Freezone Authority partners with Dell EMC

The Dubai Airport Freezone Authority (DAFZA) is partnering with Dell EMC initiating a landmark project titled ‘DAFZA Cloud’.

This collaboration aims to power the ambitious vision to provide transformative ICT services to all stakeholders.

In line with the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, DAFZA’s strategy is geared towards leveraging frontline ICT solutions to develop and deliver innovative accelerated digital services and achieve unparalleled customer happiness.

Expanding on these smart transformation efforts, DAFZA will adopt Dell EMC’s industry-leading enterprise hybrid cloud, data protection and backup solutions to offer unique services. This innovative solution will further strengthen DAFZA’s position as a powerful ICT enabler.

Helping organisations to succeed in a multi-cloud era, ‘DAFZA Cloud’ will function as an enabling platform extending the necessary ICT infrastructure, from end-to-end client solutions to high-performance computing and storage.

With a mandate to support DAFZA strategy that is in line with the Smart Dubai Strategy, the National Innovation Strategy, and 10x initiatives, DAFZA designed a roadmap spanning five years. This involves automating its internal processes and launching a new and integrated cloud infrastructure to introduce and improve a range of smart cloud services.

“As an entity known for innovation-based initiatives, we required an integrated platform that successfully meets our objective of accelerating growth, continually innovating and delivering services that cater to the rapidly evolving digital economy. In our journey to evolve to a digital-ready organisation, in line with the broader vision of the leadership, we believe Dell EMC is the right partner to help us enhance our ICT capabilities and make Dubai the happiest and smartest city in the world.” said Buthaina Bin Fahad, Senior Director of Information and Communication Technology at DAFZA.

Fady Richmany, Senior Director and General Manager, at Dell EMC, said: “We are proud to stand alongside DAFZA as a trusted partner and play a role in their digital transformation and success. Given their pace of ensuring digital-readiness, our work with them is to enable delivery of cloud infrastructure and services to provide complete access to smart services and empower innovation. With this partnership, we are committed to supporting DAFZA in their mission to achieve the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of creating a smart and sustainable future for Dubai.”

We asked Buthaina Hamad Bin Fahad, Senior Director of Information and Communication Technology at DAFZA, some further questions to find out more about the system.

Why has DAFZA chosen to adopt Dell EMC’s enterprise hybrid cloud, data protection and backup solutions?

This collaboration aims to power the ambitious vision to provide transformative ICT services to all stakeholders. By adopting Dell EMC’s Enterprise hybrid cloud, data protection and backup solutions, we intend to offer IT-as-a-Service by introducing the one-of-a-kind ‘Office in the Cloud’. This service will function as an enabling platform extending the necessary ICT infrastructure, from end-to-end client solutions to high-performance computing and storage for organisations to help them succeed in a multi-cloud era.

How will the Dell EMC Solution strengthen DAFZA’s position as a powerful ICT enabler?

In line with the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, DAFZA’s strategy is geared towards leveraging frontline ICT solutions to develop and deliver innovative accelerated digital services and achieve unparalleled customer happiness. Expanding on these smart transformation efforts, DAFZA designed a roadmap spanning five years. This involves leveraging Dell EMC solutions to automate internal processes and launching a new and integrated cloud infrastructure to introduce and improve a range of smart cloud services that will be offered through DAFZA Cloud.

This innovative solution successfully meets our objective of accelerating growth, continually innovating and delivering services that cater to the rapidly evolving digital economy and is in line with the Smart Dubai Strategy, the National Innovation Strategy, and 10x initiatives – thus, strengthening our position as an ICT enabler.

How will the system help to accelerate growth and to deliver services?

IT is undergoing a seismic shift as we stand at the threshold of digital revolution. IT itself needs to operate as a business in order to draw competitive differentiation by leveraging software innovation, cloud and more. Hence, with this new integrated IT environment we aim to become the engine of digital transformation for our organisation.

This new infrastructure is designed to improve our ability to respond, and meet and exceed the needs of our business, while making our cost structure transparent, consolidated and controlled. The system is future-ready and is capable of hosting future requirements by developing, testing and deploying applications and services to the market at a faster rate and delivering instant, self-service resources needed to accelerate our success. Moreover, this also helps us in re-allocating and re-investing resources towards driving our business forward.

How will DAFZA Cloud function as an enabling platform?

Ultimately, DAFZA Cloud platform will allow IT to transform how they approach service delivery and create an environment that enables the creation of disruptive tools that fit into new business models, increase customer engagement and enable better social experiences.  DAFZA Cloud will act as a critical enabler for both IT and business transformation and will enable organisations to shift to a pull model for technology that is built based on enhanced services, consumption models and end-to-end automation of IT services and operation workflows to guarantee fast time to market.

How is DAFZA automating its internal processes?

DAFZA’s cloud platform delivers automated infrastructure services for traditional enterprise applications with greater speed, scalability and agility, while reducing costs and minimising risks. Automated operations workflows and application blueprints that are designed, tested and integrated by Dell EMC will transform what was once manual into automated infrastructure provisioning, on-demand, with management insights and cost transparency. The DAFZA Cloud will deliver IT-as-a-Service to meet required business needs with add-on options for data protection, disaster recovery and more.

How will a new and integrated cloud infrastructure be introduced?

Introducing the new face of IT, DAFZA will offer an expandable service catalogue, presented through a simple self-service portal that includes all of the services that DAFZA has chosen to deliver.  Beneath the covers a full software defined datacentre will be deployed based on VMware and hyper-converged technology but as with any cloud service provider, the self-service portal will be the main interface.

What smart cloud services will be introduced?

Besides the ‘Office in the Cloud”, multiple service packages are planned to be part of DAFZA’s Cloud offering such as ‘Infrastructure as a Service’, ‘Backup as a Service’, ‘Disaster Recovery as a Service’, ‘Software as a Service’, ‘Database as a Service’, ‘Video Surveillance as a Service’, ‘Desktop as a Service’, ‘Security as a Service’ and much more to be offered on this third generation enabled platform.