Confluent Cloud, a cloud-native service for Apache Kafka, allows data to flow across boundaries without the heavy labour requirements associated with infrastructure management
Confluent Cloud is now available to customers in the UAE through Microsoft’s local Azure data centres in the country.
“Data sovereignty and residency is increasingly important to modern digital projects in the region, forcing enterprises to look to their cloud providers to support their compliance efforts,” said Fred Crehan, Area Vice President, Emerging Markets at Confluent. “Now that Confluent Cloud is being locally hosted, we can bring peerless, reliable data streaming to our regional customers and empower them in their digital transformation initiatives in an increasingly hybrid and multi-cloud world.”
Microsoft Azure regions offer Confluent the availability, high performance, low latency, and security it needs to meet customer standards of flexibility, reliability, and disaster recovery. Additionally, because data is stored in-country, Confluent can cater to highly regulated verticals such as government and financial services. “Microsoft’s UAE region is the home of choice for any innovative cloud offering because of our ability to offer top-grade availability, latency, and security,” said Onur Gorur, Director of Product Management, Microsoft MEA. “Confluent has established itself as a leader in data infrastructure and management with its open-source data streaming platform ‘data in motion’ offering.”
Confluent Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-native service for connecting and processing data, everywhere it is needed. Its elastic scalability and virtually infinite storage simplify real-time data movement across public and private clouds. And it offers managed connectors to the most popular data sources in the Kafka ecosystem, as well as SQL-based stream processing and a governance suite for streaming data, all from the same access pane. As a cloud service, the offering is backed by 99.95% uptimes that are guaranteed by SLAs.
Moreover, Confluent has worked to ensure some of the industry’s most robust enterprise-grade security and compliance measures are in place. For example, Confluent recently announced Stream Governance advanced, which includes Schema Registry for Stream Quality is now globally available. By more than doubling the global availability of Schema Registry to 28 regions, customers have more flexibility to manage schemas directly alongside their Kafka clusters in order to maintain strict compliance requirements and data sovereignty.
The UAE’s local data centre is the first location Confluent has chosen for its hyperscale platform, alongside the recently launched cloud offering in Qatar via Azure. Its move to offer data in motion to UAE customers on Azure is a strong signal of its ongoing commitment to the region, and the strengthening of its partnership with Azure which was announced last year. In April this year, the company opened headquarters in Dubai, establishing a local presence with dedicated teams in sales, solution engineering, professional services, customer success, and channel functions.
Crehan added, “Confluent views the Middle East as a major growth market, and as more and more organisations make the move over to hybrid and multi-cloud models, Confluent Cloud will be there to offer the flexibility and security they need to grow and thrive.”
