Nassib Chamoun is General Manager at Cirrus, located in Lebanon’s capital city Beirut. An ITG company, Cirrus is an enterprise-class cloud computing and managed services portfolio provider, catering for different service models (Infrastructure, Platform and Software) and different deployment scenarios (Private, Public or Hybrid Cloud).

With a core requirement for a robust IT stack located in a growing number of datacenters, Cirrus demands high-uptime, low administrative overhead and scalable room for growth, expansion and diversification. Chamoun and his team have helped Cirrus become one of the most progressive managed services and colocation providers in the Middle East. The company’s datacenter experts custom-design the best solution for every customer to ensure optimum data, voice, network and cloud performance.

CXO Focus spoke to Chamoun for the inside track on his operational strategy.

High Value In Data Sovereignty 

As a managed cloud services provider born here in and of the region, we often say that we are filling the data sovereignty gap for the Arab world. Most organizations do want to move some (or indeed all) workloads to public cloud, but like many parts of the world, in regions like ours there are specific data sovereignty laws that need to be complied with.

To answer this growing market requirement, we have built our own datacenters in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan with a further operation planned for Iraq. These facilities are custom-engineered to be able to provide domestic cloud for workloads that need to run locally. Whatever their mix of cloud resources, we know that customers want the whole workload to be managed from one interface and from one single corporate entity… and so that’s what we deliver.

The majority of our customers are financial institutions and banks running particularly mission critical workloads, which is a challenge and process that we intrinsically understand due to our track record in this market segment. They also want to run traditional infrastructure services and do so while being able to deliver their entire technology layer in compliance with different banking laws and traditions.

New Channels For A Data Lake

To answer the requirements created by the insurance sector in this region we have also built our own data lake. An increasing number of insurance specialists are now working to develop services that leverage Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to track automobile braking systems and other aspects of car performance. Sometimes charged on a pay-per-mile basis, this type of application has the potential to create new channels of raw and unstructured data, so the data lake provides that much needed repository to manage that stream of information.

The Cirrus Promise

Cirrus sums up its market proposition by reminding customers that it exists to address the challenges of maintaining scalability and high availability of any hosted database or application. The high availability of critical services is guaranteed by coordinating the replication and recovery and using geographic redundancy. The company’s professionals have a deep understanding of application infrastructure design and service operations, to help simplify the management of applications running on the cloud, while ensuring the best performance, operations and support.