BUILDING THE FUTURE

MORO HUB EMBRACES A SUSTAINABLE MULTI-CLOUD STRATEGY AND HELP POWER THE UAE’S SMART GOVERNMENT AND SMART CITY AMBITIONS.

As part of 10X, DEWA mobilised its innovation unit to create a new entity called Digital DEWA, which uses innovation in artificial intelligence and digital services to meet the current and future requirements brought about by the 4th industrial revolution. This entity required an innovative, agile data hub, and thus Moro Hub was established in 2018. Forming the backbone of Digital DEWA, Moro Hub was established to fulfil the need for an innovative and agile data centre and to drive digital transformation throughout the UAE and meet the country’s ambitious sustainability goals by helping to reduce IT’s carbon footprint.

Moro Hub proudly contributes to the UAE’s future vision. It works alongside other strategic initiatives, including the Park. This will be the largest, 100 percent solar-powered, tier-III data centre in the Middle East and Africa, with a capacity of more than 100 megawatts (MW).

While Moro Hub’s data centres had the core infrastructure in place, it still needed to develop a modern service catalog. This would allow it to automate manual processes and enable organisations across the UAE to transform their operations. To help move organisations to the cloud, it also needed access to the right expertise to build cloud offerings and services to launch on its cloud platform.

Dubai Plan 2021, UAE Centennial 2071, and Dubai 10X, an attempt to position the city as 10 years ahead of the rest of the world.

For Moro Hub to deliver its mission, it needed to become an end-to-end service provider, hosting, and delivering sustainable cloud-based services to organisations across the UAE. As well as offering a sustainable cloud-hosting solution, it also wanted to provide cybersecurity services along with managed and professional services.

Moro Hub is upgrading the country’s IT infrastructure, and it launched the first Green Data Centre that was the region’s first tier-III, solar-powered data centre in Dubai in October 2020. In May 2021, due to strong demand, Moro Hub announced plans to build a second data centre in Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar

Embracing cloud for a service-oriented approach

Moro Hub selected VMware to help build a multi-cloud platform to enable its customers, including government

entities, to operate and manage their own clouds and deliver future-oriented services. As well as improving operations across businesses in the UAE, the move also supports the country’s digital transformation ambitions, including a goal for all government services to be accessible from anywhere, at any time, by 2023.

SMohammad Bin Sulaiman, Moro Hub’s CEO, says: “After establishing our data centres, we knew that with the right software-defined solution, we would be able to maximise the investment and offer government and enterprises truly compelling services that would open new digital opportunities for them while enhancing their sustainability.”

The multi-cloud platform consists of several integrated VMware solutions with the VMware Cloud Provider Platform at the centre. Moro Hub deployed VMware vSphere as its core virtualisation tool, enabling it to deliver developer-ready infrastructure to its customers, while VMware vSAN provides the hyperconverged infrastructure for storage virtualisation, allowing Moro Hub to combine all the elements of a traditional data centre in a virtual environment.

Finally, VMware NSX micro-segments the network, improving security. NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) provides an agent-less firewall for each workload that inspects every packet in/out of every workload, analysing inbound and outbound traffic to the workload for malicious content. It blocks the unnecessary inbound and outbound traffic between workloads without changing the underlying networking (also known as micro-segmentation), and reduces the attack vectors for ransomware

Moro Hub has also deployed VMware Cloud Director, a cloud service delivery platform, allowing it to share and allocate resources across multiple tenants, offer security and self-service, and enable tenants to do their operational work. Moro Hub is also using Container Service Extension (CSE) to offer Kubernetesas-a Service, giving customers the capability to build and deploy cloud-native applications such as e-health and traffic management apps.

VMware Professional Services worked with Moro Hub’s senior leadership team to define, create, and implement a competitive cloud services portfolio. A comprehensive catalog was built providing a full self-service experience for Moro Hub’s customers. Tools were created that allow tenants to automate, operate, and manage their own clouds, thus reducing Moro Hub’s operational overhead. Knowledge transfer sessions were executed which have enabled Moro Hub to build new services and operate, manage, and expand its cloud environment.

Driving growth and sustainability

VMware Cloud Provider Platform enables Moro Hub to expand its cloud services portfolio to offer highly scalable ondemand VMware services with security, compliance, and data sovereignty, creating revenue opportunities for customers and helping them to monetise their services. On-demand-based services will enable government entities and private enterprises to adopt new transformative technologies more quickly such as AI, 5G, and Edge computing. In turn, it will be easier for organisations to launch new applications, use flexible consumption-based billing models, and offer cloud-based services to customers.

By driving the adoption of cloud-based services and enabling organisations to move from a Capex to an Opex model, Moro Hub helps organisations across the UAE to increase their efficiency and agility while reducing unnecessary spend on IT equipment and maintenance. This is empowering organisations to become smart, lean enterprises that are better equipped to respond to market needs.

Most importantly, the new solutions are helping the UAE fulfill its goal of developing sustainable smart government and smart city solutions. It gives organisations the flexibility they need to return to growth as the impact of COVID-19 subsides.

Meanwhile, access to cloud solutions powered by renewable energy means customers can cut their IT carbon footprint. The reduced need for physical IT infrastructure helps minimise e-waste.

“Moro Hub is a true enabler for customers to achieve their digital transformation ambitions and to become more efficient, sustainable, and scalable,” says Sulaiman.“We’ve delivered on our promise to support our customers to create modern, cloud-native applications that help improve lives and support Dubai’s sustainability ambitions.”

Moro Hub is well on its way to achieving its vision of becoming the ‘digital services provider of choice’ for governmental and private organisations in the UAE and beyond. It also holds multiple ISO certifications and it is the only cloud service provider in the UAE to be certified by Dubai Electronic Security Center (DESC). Moro Hub earlier also partnered with the Dubai Digital Authority (Previously Smart Dubai Department) for the provision of a Government Information Network (GIN) node at Moro Hub to accelerate the digital transformation initiatives of Dubai Government entities.

Looking ahead, Moro Hub plans to continue onboarding new customers and help them to embrace a cloud-first approach to innovation and as a VMware Cloud Verified partner, it also encourages its customers to continue innovating.