A new analysis shows that while isolated disruptions have occurred, the region’s data centre ecosystem remains stable, highlighting the growing importance of resilience-first infrastructure design.

A Live Stress Test for Digital Infrastructure

Rising tensions across the Middle East have brought renewed scrutiny to the resilience of critical digital systems.

According to a recent analysis from DC Byte, the situation is less a breakdown—and more a real-world stress test for modern infrastructure. In its latest report, Assessing the Impact of the Middle East Conflict on Data Centres, the firm outlines how the sector is responding under pressure.

Minimal Disruption, Strong Architecture

Out of 233 data centre developments across the GCC, only a small number have been directly affected.

Crucially:

• Workloads have been successfully rerouted

• Core services have remained largely uninterrupted

• Infrastructure redundancy has performed as designed

This reflects a broader shift in infrastructure strategy—where resilience is built into systems from the outset, rather than added later.

Risk Is Reshaping Strategy

While the system has held up, the conflict is accelerating changes in how operators approach infrastructure design.

Key priorities now include:

• Advanced physical risk modelling

• Distributed and decentralised workloads

• Multi-region redundancy frameworks

These approaches are rapidly moving from best practice to baseline expectation.

Supply Chains Still Matter

Beyond operational resilience, the report highlights emerging pressure points in logistics and connectivity.

Disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz are introducing:

• Shipping delays

• Routing constraints

• Increased costs

These issues reinforce a critical insight:

Even the most advanced digital systems remain dependent on physical infrastructure and global supply chains.

Investment Momentum Remains Strong

Despite geopolitical uncertainty, investor confidence in the region appears largely unchanged.

The data shows:

• 2.4GW of qualified capacity

• 2GW+ in early-stage planning

• No major investor withdrawals

This suggests that the market continues to be viewed as high-growth, with manageable risk exposure.

Infrastructure Meets Geopolitics

DC Byte CEO Bernard Johnson notes that the situation highlights a deeper trend:

The growing interaction between geopolitical risk and digital infrastructure.

In practical terms, this means data centres are no longer just technical assets—they are increasingly seen as strategic infrastructure.

The Bigger Picture

As demand for cloud computing, AI, and digital services continues to expand, resilience is becoming a defining factor in infrastructure investment.

The Middle East is now demonstrating that:

• Modern architectures can withstand localized disruption

• Redundancy is no longer optional

• Infrastructure design must account for geopolitical uncertainty

Conclusion

So far, the region’s data centre ecosystem is proving resilient under pressure.

But the long-term impact may be even more significant:

• Greater emphasis on distributed infrastructure

• Increased investment in risk-aware design

• A shift toward resilience as a competitive differentiator

In an increasingly unpredictable world, uptime is no longer just an engineering challenge—it’s a strategic one.

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Why would we want to build a parallel reality populated by digital twins?

Sure, it sounds cool, yet this “virtual twinning” effectively extends the possibilities of both the “world of atoms and the world of bits“ as HoloLens inventor Alex Kipman eloquently put it in a TED talk which has been viewed over 3.5 million times.

There is already an entire ecosystem emerging around the challenges of sensing, mapping, and replicating objects from the real world into the digital – and vice-versa
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This is not some distant blue-sky thinking. There is already an entire ecosystem emerging around the challenges of sensing, mapping, and replicating objects from the real world into the digital – and vice-versa. In fact, one of the main applications of the 5G connectivity infrastructure rollout will be to mirror physical objects and environments digitally in real-time. That, in turn, would enable XR (extended reality) applications to be built which bring quantifiable value to users.

5G applications that consumers will “get”

“I don’t think the average person really comes close to realizing just how much of a quantum leap we’re talking about,” says Deeyook CEO Gideon Rottem. “They think it will be faster, but literally it will enable things that will make what we have now pale in comparison,” he adds.

Rottem’s Israel-based company has developed a self-learning tracking solution that measures the angles of wireless transmissions – tapping into the existing 1.7 billion wireless access points that already exist globally – to determine positioning of employees, items and assets (within 10 cm) without tapping into a company’s IT network and without invasive personal tracking or data capturing.

These mapping technologies are going to interact with the cloud differently, as it no longer becomes necessary to upload images in order to understand what the user is standing in front of. According to Rottem, once we achieve accurate positioning, we can also create accurate virtual worlds (largely automatically) so the integration between the physical and the digital can become seamless.

These mapping technologies are going to interact with the cloud differently, as it no longer becomes necessary to upload images in order to understand what the user is standing in front of
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A newly released report by research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics revealed that although consumers are intrigued by 5G, speed on its own is not enough to sell them on the idea of upgrading. This is partly because it is difficult to grasp what it will enable them to do. CSPs will need to solve existing pain-points and entice customers with new experiences.

In practical terms, spatial mapping technologies are crucial in enabling the type of integrated applications that not only address practical customer needs but also create these “wow” factors that will prompt mass adoption of 5G. The above research found that what got consumers most excited about the prospect were immersive experiences such as holographic conversations and XR field training.

A newly released report by research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics revealed that although consumers are intrigued by 5G, speed on its own is not enough to sell them on the idea of upgrading
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It’s not a surprise, therefore, to see many companies in the connectivity space embracing immersive technology and content as they seek to bridge this “imagination gap”.

An example of a CSP doing just that is UK mobile giant Three, which recently released a highly produced tongue-in-cheek advert which shows us what a 5G-enabled holographic future could look like.

“Hold on to your crumpets,” says Three in their recent 5G ads.

Many companies in the connectivity space embracing immersive technology and content as they seek to bridge the consumer imagination gap
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Moetsi is a company working to build the spatial mapping infrastructure to make that future happen by offering “sensor stream processing on the edge.” This effectively boils down to processing vast amounts of data in real-time and delivering it in a format that makes sense and is relevant to the context of where it is being applied.

We will see an explosion of XR applications that provide immense value industry and enterprise, as well as mind-blowing experiences for individual consumers
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To illustrate how an application could leverage this, Moetsi co-founder Adam Polak gives an example of someone about to cross a street getting alerted that the car moving towards them isn’t slowing down for the red light. At that point, all our decisions would potentially become augmented and informed by tapping into these edge-processed datastreams, fundamentally changing our relationship with technology, the world around us, and one another.

3D mapping in arts and entertainment

There are use cases already emerging of spatial mapping being applied to create, transform, and augment art. Award-winning immersive content studio HEAVY has partnered with the Marriott hotel group to build a “secret digital garden” at the JW Marriott Anaheim Resort which was  due to open in April. The project leveraged mapping technology from 6D.ai, a company that set out to build  “a 3D map of the world” and has since been acquired by Niantic, the makers of Pokémon GO.

This feature of persistence is key to understanding the value these real-time mapping technologies bring to such experiences. In this case, HEAVY produced a fine art installation blending physical, custom-made sculptures with augmented reality elements to create a serene space where resort guests and visitors can plant their own fantastical trees while enjoying playing among digital caterpillars and butterflies.

There are use cases already emerging of spatial mapping being applied to create, transform, and augment art
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What makes the zen-like experience more than a bit of fun, however, is the narrative backdrop for the magical plant’s evolution from sapling to tree. By performing the digital meditations, each guest will figuratively transform into a different kind of tree, personalized around their choices, which can then be further nurtured over time like a flora version of Tamagotchi. This means that the way users interact with and nurture their trees will affect how it develops, and consequently what type of experience each person generates and enjoys.

How will this technology come to life?

Improving the speed at which connected devices can stream information to an authoritative server will be a crucial piece of that puzzle according to Polak, as improvements in networking such as 5G will help reduce the latency and increase the amount of sensors that can communicate in a local area, something that the current generation of networking infrastructure simply cannot cope with.

“The engineering challenge is enormous: being able to interpret any sensor data correctly in a manner that can be used by application developers to provide value to end-users, basically not only seeing, but understanding anything a device can sense in the world,” Polak adds.”

So, are we there yet? Well, yes and no. A lot of this technology already exists but it is hampered by the fact that nearly every XR developer has to roll out their own solutions to build cross-platform applications that can be shared with all users.

According to Polak, initiatives like OpenXR are addressing the problem of having to build separate implementations for ARKit, ARCore, and MRTK (Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Toolkit) by enabling developers to access XR device data through a single interface.

A lot of this technology already exists but it is hampered by the fact that nearly every XR developer has to roll out their own solutions to build cross-platform applications that can be shared with all users
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Once we arrive at that convergence of 5G connectivity and the ability to interact with digitized objects in platform-agnostic experiences that are embedded in our own physical reality, our world as we know it will never be the same. We will see an explosion of XR applications that provide immense value industry and enterprise, as well as mind-blowing experiences for individual consumers.

So while wrapping your head around the concept of building a “Mirror World” might be difficult at first, once it clicks into place we’re likely to wonder how we ever settled for such an ordinary reality in the first place.

This article was originally published on Futurithmic

#SpatialMapping technologies are crucial in enabling the type of integrated applications that not only address practical customer needs but also create these WOW factors that will prompt mass adoption of #5G. https://t.co/2wC9FhIFdq pic.twitter.com/vnsLln2VPY

— Futurithmic (@futurithmic) May 1, 2020

Tech Trends offers a broad range of Digital Consultancy services to guide companies, individuals, and brands in effectively leveraging existing and emerging technologies in their business strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a XR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

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By Amr Salem, CEO & Sridhar Gadhi, Founder & Chairman of Quantela

Technology companies have traditionally sold their products in much the same way as physical commodities. There was little or no difference between buying a toothbrush from your local supermarket or MS office for your computer. We can call this model of transaction – where the customer pays a certain price for a certain product and considers it the end of the story – Consumption 1.0.

After the financial crisis in 2008, however, technology providers had to find innovative ways to deal with drastically reduced IT budgets, and increase their addressable market by lowering the barrier to entry for smaller customers. The introduction of cloud computing made it possible to deliver “anything as a service” (XaaS), and new flexible consumption models have emerged that are far more economical. This model, where a subscription gives you the right to use MS Office rather than paying the full cost upfront, can be described as Consumption 2.0. Like Microsoft, most tech companies such as AWS, SAP, Oracle, IBM, and Cisco offer their products on a subscription basis, and for many there is no longer even an option to purchase the product in any other way.

The relationship between the Offered Value and the Aspired Value should define the price the buyer should pay to the supplier
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Many companies, however, continued to innovate this consumption model by offering customers the opportunity to only pay for what they actually use. This, in turn, lowered the barrier of entry for smaller customers and increased the addressable market for firms such as SAP, which entered the SME space after it was known for years as the Rolls Royce of ERP, only accessible to large enterprises. These “pay-as-you-grow” consumption models offer customers a minimum entry point based on their needs today, and as they grow and their requirements change, they can then buy more licenses, storage, processing power, features or bandwidth as required. These models were not necessarily restricted to XaaS or subscription pricing structures, but have also been applied to some perpetual or CAPEX based pricing offers. Let’s call this Consumption 3.0.

Throughout this evolution, customers became better educated and empowered, and we have seen a power shift towards the user, who increasingly questions why they have to pay for the technology they consume, and not just pay for the value they are getting out of it.

Technology companies have traditionally sold their products in much the same way as physical commodities
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Aspired, Offered, and Economic Value

This is the right question to ask. Customers are seeking quantifiable value from their technology investments. Before technology buyers commit to a new technology investment, they must identify the outcomes they are looking for, and convert these outcomes into economic value. This Aspired Value is the value gained by the buyer from the economic outcomes generated by the technology implementation.

Once the buyer’s aspired value is understood, the technology provider needs to deliver on those desired outcomes. This is the Offered Value by the supplier.

After the financial crisis in 2008 technology providers had to find innovative ways to deal with drastically reduced IT budgets
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Logically, the relationship between the Offered Value and the Aspired Value should define the price the buyer should pay to the supplier. A solution from “Supplier A” that has a higher Offered Value than a solution from “Supplier B” should be more expensive to acquire by the buyer, as long as it is aligned with the Aspired Value and the outcomes the buyer is seeking. This brings us to how technology companies should be re-thinking their pricing models and offerings so that they reflect a clear co-relation between Aspired, Offered, and Economic Value.

When a technology provider understands the outcomes desired and can convert these into economic value for the buyer, they are able to effectively use that projected economic value as collateral, enabling customers to obtain internal buy-in, approvals and financing by justifying the budget ask with data.

Most technology providers will gradually pivot towards some form of Outcome-Based model which aligns the goals of all stakeholders
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Smart City technology is a case in point. The benefits of deploying these to optimize assets usage, reduce cost of maintenance and generate additional revenues, are widely recognized, yet most cities seeking to implement these struggle with finding the needed budget.

Therefore, Smart City solution providers are looking at collaborative ways to unlock economic value, which could, in turn, be used to finance the capital required to deploy the solution. Smart Lighting is a good use case here, where savings generated by lower energy consumption due to LED lights efficiency and smarter controls reduce operating costs associated with street lighting. These savings can be used to guarantee and repay the debt of financing the city borrowed to deploy the smart lighting infrastructure.

Smart City solution providers are looking at collaborative ways to unlock economic value
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This most evolved outcome-based consumption model, where the initial financing is guaranteed and repaid by the sought economic value outcomes from the technology solution, can be called Consumption 4.0, where customers are not paying for consumption, but rather become collaborative partners with the technology provider, as both strive to achieve mutually beneficial goals and KPIs.

Outcome-Based Financing is the vehicle used by technology providers to address this emerging trend. This is a sign of maturity in the technology industry, which will push providers to focus everything they do from R&D to advertising on the value and outcomes they are delivering to the market. This model is still in its early stages, yet we are already seeing many examples of long-term concessions for Smart technologies, Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) being formed to share value between private and public sector, and advertising revenues financing digital signage projects in large malls or stadia.

In the not-so-distant future, this evolution will come to a head, and we believe most technology providers will gradually pivot towards some form of Outcome-Based model which aligns the goals of all stakeholders. This will not only generate the best economic outcomes, but also democratize access to technology and generate extra value that filters down to individual citizens and benefits society at large.

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Thousands of developers gather in Seattle as Microsoft Build unveils new products and an ambitious vision for the future of technology.

We're seeing a paradigm change in user experience
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The opening keynotes of this morning’s conference – from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Executive Vice Presidents Scott Guthrie and Harry Shum – outlined the company’s vision for becoming the world’s largest productivity platform. With over 500 million Windows 10 monthly active devices, and 90% of Fortune 500 companies already using the Microsoft Cloud, their combined platforms offer developers like those in the audience “over a billion opportunities to reach and connect with Microsoft customers. You can, for example, achieve single sign-on across 12 million organizations, dramatically reducing friction, yet this fantastic opportunity comes with tremendous responsibility,” said Nadella. “The future of technology will be determined by the choices we make as developers.”

The future of technology will be determined by developers' choices
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He then showed the audience a poignant video which told the story of how Haiyan Zhang, Innovation Director at Microsoft Research Cambridge, invented and programmed a wearable that helped designer Emma Lawton manage the hand tremors caused by her advancing Parkinson’s disease. It ends with the moment when Lawton – wearing the Emma, the watch-like device that was named after her – managers to write her name and draw straight lines again for the first time in many months. As they cry openly, it was difficult not to join in, and as both women joined Nadella onstage they received the morning’s biggest round of applause.

Although the rest of the demos and testimonials weren’t quite as emotional as that, the common theme that ran through all of them was one of highlighting how all these high-level technologies actually translate into real-world problem solving for businesses, individuals, and society as a whole. The tone it set for the conference was one of grounded and confident optimism for the future that developers can build with them, and, that takes shape in the idea of the Microsoft Graph.

We're moving towards an intelligent cloud with an intelligent edge
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What underpins this expansion of the Microsoft Graph is the idea that we’re moving from a mobile-first and cloud-first world towards an integrated intelligent cloud with an intelligent edge. This intelligent cloud will ultimately enable us to search the real world in the same way as we do the digital one, by building in contextual awareness that combines insights from devices and the world of work.

“This is a fundamental change in the paradigm of the apps that we are building,” says Nadella. And because this new type of user experience that is emerging will span all our devices, it will need new platform capabilities such as Azure IoT Edge, which seamlessly extends cloud computing to a range of edge devices.

Artificial Intelligence is also a big piece of that vision, and Microsoft’s ambition is to use AI to augment the capabilities of every developer, organization, platform and person to achieve more, “amplifying human ingenuity with intelligent technology.”

It is ultimately up to us whether the future we build with technology becomes an utopia or a dystopia
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Ultimately, as Nadella concludes, it is up to us whether the future we build with technology is utopian or dystopian. He told the audience he was an unapologetic technology optimist, yet also keenly aware of the unintended consequences that often come from adopting new technologies. In other words, we need to guard against an Orwellian 1984 scenario while embracing the fact that we’re very much living in a Brave New World.

The user experience of the future will span all your devices. From mobile first to the intelligent cloud @satyanadella #MSBuild2017 pic.twitter.com/WxXD0CHvWL

— Alice Bonasio (@alicebonasio) May 10, 2017

Here are some of the main announcements and news from Microsoft Build 2017

• Azure Cosmos DB – Touted as the industry’s first globally distributed multi-model database services built from the ground up to power planet-scale cloud services and data-intensive applications — from IoT to AI to mobile — it promises greater fault tolerance and support for all data types, delivering millisecond latency at the 99^th percentile
• Visual Studio 2017 for Mac enables developers to work seamlessly across Windows and Mac environments with full support for mobile, web and cloud workloads, and previews of Docker tools, Azure Functions and Xamarin.IoT support.
• Customizable cognitive services such as Bing Custom Search, Custom Vision Service, Custom Decision Service and Video Indexes now join a roster of 29 services available to developers, each with unique customization options that enable customization of intelligence capabilities such as vision, speech, language, knowledge and search into apps and bot experiences.
• Cognitive Services Labs were also launched, enabling developers to experiment with new services, such as a Gesture API, which, although still in early stages, offers some exciting possibilities for developing Mixed Reality applications for devices such as the HoloLens, which are already operated partially through gestures
• Cortana Partnerships were signed with HP on devices and Intel on reference platforms to deliver Cortana-enabled devices. Additionally, the Cortana skills kit is now in public preview (Currently S. only), where developers can build skills for Cortana by creating a bot and publishing it to the new Cortana channel of the Bot Framework across Windows 10, Android, iOS and the new Cortana-powered Harman Kardon Invoke speaker.
• MySQL and PostgreSQL-managed services that join Azure SQL Database to give developers expanded choice and flexibility on a service platform to deliver more availability and scalability, with minimal downtime, plus data retention and recovery.
• Database migration services, which will allow Oracle and SQL Server customers to more easily move their data and quickly modernize their apps..
• Windows Server Containers support in Azure Service Fabric, with Visual Studio tooling, and a preview of the ability to use Docker Compose support for Service Fabric to deploy containerized apps to Service Fabric — enabling developers to deliver mission-critical, scalable apps and services.
• DocuSign supports a rapidly growing customer base of 300,000 companies and more than 200 million users across 188 countries. The company today announced Microsoft Azure is its preferred cloud for global expansion, starting in Canada. DocuSign uses Azure SQL Database to process much larger volumes of digital transactions.
• Microsoft Graph APIs available to developers, including APIs from SharePoint and Planner. The Microsoft Graph gives developers access to Office 365 data and intelligence and helps connect between people, conversations, projects, schedules, processes and content. These insights help developers build smarter apps and enable smarter ways to work.
• Presentation Translator, which leverages Microsoft’s Translation APIs, was featured, allowing real-time translation to multiple languages during any presentation.
• Adaptive cards supported by the Microsoft Bot Framework, developers can write cards once that work across multiple apps and platforms. Using the Bot Framework, developers can also now publish to new channels including Bing, Cortana and Skype for Business, and implement Microsoft’s payment request API for checkout in their bots.
• Azure Batch AI Training is a new Azure offering currently only available in private preview, that will allow developers and data scientists to configure an environment with parameters and run their models against multiple CPUs and GPUs, and eventually field-programmable gate arrays.
• Tact – the sales experience platform that turns any connected device into a AI-powered virtual sales assistant was demoed in anticipation of its release later this year, showing how multiple Microsoft products such as Dynamics 365, Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Cortana Skills, Microsoft Graph and Sentiment Analysis, will be integrated into it.

For companies looking to gain a competitive edge through technology, Tech Trends offers strategic Virtual Reality and Digital Transformation Consultancy services tailored to your brand.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

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