RIYADH - Mobily successfully launched an advanced cloud computing environment, the first of a series of clouds, the organization will roll out in the coming few months to maximize the utilization of its infrastructure in a more 'Green IT,' environmentally friendly manner, as well as reduce time to market.

The term "cloud" is a generic term used by information technology professionals today to describe the Internet, when coupled with "computing" it gains wider meaning: the availability of "applications," "platforms," and "infrastructure" on the fly. Cloud computing offers organizations IT resources in a cost effective, scalable, reliable, and fault tolerant manner. More important, and in addition to faster provisioning, cloud computing gives organizations easier management and monitoring of their IT resource management and this what Mobily has gained with its first cloud computing setup, which has resulted in a major cut in time to market.

"A year ago, we conducted a careful audit of our internal computing needs and those of our business customers, then we consolidated each of them, and started our first cloud computing initiative inside Mobily," said Medhat S. Amer, Mobily's Chief Information Officer.

"Today, we can now proudly say that a significant portion of our internal computing needs have been addressed with the launch of our first computing cloud without any additional investment in physical computing resources," he added.

Focusing on the efficiency of Cloud Computing, Ahmed Altheneyan, Vice President IT Operations said: "When a project needs computing resources, they can be allocated and provisioned in less than 15 minutes using our computing cloud."

Mobily has plans to rollout subsequent computing clouds for its internal computing and storage needs.

"By adopting a cloud computing approach to IT and networking needs, we have efficient utilization of our current resources, which in turn translates itself into cost savings for us," said Altheneyan, "we can take those cost savings back to the customer and provide them with affordable services, without compromise on quality."

Among successful cloud computing examples, Google's apps engine, Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Microsoft's Windows Live platform,  salesforce.com's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) cloud, Rackspace's cloud-based computing and hosting solutions.

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© Press Release 2010