QUALYS ANNOUNCES DEPLOYMENT OF NEW CLOUD PLATFORM IN SAUDI ARABIA

for threat actors. Entities like NCA [National Cybersecurity Authority] and SAMA [Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, the Kingdom’s central bank] are implementing cybersecurity regulations that protect citizens and residents, such as mandating hosting of data in-country. The Saudi Qualys Cloud Platform is the ideal solution for companies and government entities looking for flexible visibility and control while ensuring they remain compliant with these new regulations.”

Qualys launched Qualys Cloud Platform (CP) in Saudi Arabia to help organizations across the Kingdom to localize their cybersecurity and comply with an array of regulatory requirements, including those related to data residency.

“Qualys’ cloud service is built for visibility in a cloud-first world, helping public and private enterprises to take back control of their environments while ensuring that data remains within their domestic borders,” said Hadi Jaafarawi, Managing Director, Middle East, at Qualys.

“Saudi Arabia’s public and private sectors are transforming rapidly to align with the principles set out in Vision 2030, but recent expansions in the attack surface, brought about by cloud migration and remote work, make these innovators prime targets

Saudi Arabia is currently the largest ICT market in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region and according to IDC , cybersecurity spending in the Kingdom stands at 2.77B SAR (approx. US$720M) in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 12.7% from 2021 – 2026. As the Kingdom’s technology investment moves from an infrastructure- and productcentric model towards value-added professional services, government authorities have recognized the need to secure disparate architectures. Recent regulatory additions have concentrated on vulnerability, patch management and data residency.

Pixar Partners With Vast Data For New Film And Beyond

VAST Data, the data platform company for the AI era, announced that Pixar Animation Studios, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, selected VAST as the key data platform collaborator for the company’s data intensive feature animation production, including its latest, “Elemental,”.

Pixar began working with VAST in 2018 as it first pioneered new animation techniques using volumetric rendering for their acclaimed 2020 film titled, “Soul.” Its newest feature, “Elemental,” required a new way to scale these detailed volumetric characters and environments. Unlike the geometric surfaces and materials used in earlier Pixar projects, the broadly-applied volumetric animation methods used in “Elemental” created six times the data footprint and computational demands for data than that of “Soul.”

To meet the technical requirements of the Pixar creative team, Pixar turned to the VAST Data Platform to power the demanding render pipeline for Elemental as well as Pixar’s other ongoing and future productions. By moving 7.3 petabytes of data to a single datastore cluster that is managed across one high-performance namespace organized from low-cost flash - VAST provides real-time access to keep Pixar’s renderfarm constantly busy while enabling improved observability and analytics, simplified collaboration and development across multiple productions running at the same time, and laying the foundation to leverage AI and deep learning for future films.

“Pixar is the world’s leading innovator in animation, and in order to continue to deliver new stories, breath-taking visual environments and memorable