Time

Session

Driving the vision of digitalization in Saudi Arabia

• Addressing the urgency to opt for cloud-based solutions and meet the demand for storage capacity requirement surged by the digital transformation vision
• Cloud-first policy and its role in encouraging Saudi public sector to migrate to cloud models
• Adopting cloud to increase the Kingdom’s capacity in integrating emerging and leading-edge technologies
• Creating a digital legacy by supporting data centers in the Kingdom to empower businesses from different scales and drive private sector’s development

• Creating a holistic legal landscape for enterprises by understanding key framework provisions
• Addressing cloud computing regulations in key areas including cloud Service Level Agreement’s (SLA), data sovereignty, certification, and data protection
• Expediting the transition to cloud by adhering to a unified cloud framework
• Maximizing opportunities for local providers and hyperscalers in the Saudi cloud market share
• Easing legislation and law difficulties to support and attract investments in the industry

Building cloud infrastructure and ecosystem capabilities

• Industry insight 1
• Industry insight 2

• Fostering collaborations and investments to transform Saudi Arabia into the main data center hub of the region
• Enabling the growth of hyper scale data centers in Saudi Arabia to drive other key players to invest and localize their services in the Kingdom
• Implementing green practices to reduce power consumption in cloud environments and improve sustainability
• Boosting database resilience in high transactions and heavy traffic environments with IoT, AI, ML, and automation

• Dr. Duaa Abaoud, Digital Environment Director, Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs and Housing
• Dr. Ahmed Aldammas, Executive Director Cybersecurity & Risk CISO - CRO, The Council of Cooperative Health Insurance
• Fawaz Kilfaden, Chief Information and Smart City Officer, Emaar, The Economic City, King Abdullah Economic City

• Assessing cultural behavior in organizations and building a transform-ready culture for successful cloud transitioning
• Bridging gaps between the corporate and functional levels in the organization
• Identifying methods to effectively manage change drawbacks and expectations
• Enforcing positive communication to decrease resistance during migration process
• Creating a vigorous cloud change management strategy to renounce old deployment models

• Abdulrahman Huwaymil, Head of IT Services, Confidential

Gearing up to achieve impeccable results upon migrating to cloud

• Assessing the full journey of moving to the cloud, including time, project complexity and business continuity
• Designing the migration plan according to the organization’s ability for change and capability to endure transformation
• Modeling an actionable roadmap that links strategy with execution
• Weighing out and leveraging benefits of cloud models such as maintenance, scalability, flexibility, cost, and security

• Industry insight 1
• Industry insight 2

• Overcoming inefficient utilization of the cloud infrastructure to end overpayment of unused services
• Implementing dynamic resource provisioning based on automatic vertical scaling to reduce time and efforts
• Consistently analyzing and identifying prospects to downsize deployed instances without compromising on performance or business requirements
• Opting for containers that run granular resource allocation and their role in selecting instance sizes with more precision

• Dr. Dhabiah Alboainen, Founding Board Member, Saudi Cloud Computing Association

Time

Session

Optimizing cloud security for government and enterprises

• Exploring top cyber threats to cloud computing and assessing mitigation techniques to avoid potential damage
• The importance of anomaly detection in increasing cloud reliability
• Implementing strong security practices by transforming cloud systems and infrastructures to mine fields to prevent advanced persistent threats
• Applying trust evaluation schemes to establish zero trust architecture in cloud computing environment

• Abdulrahman Al-Nimari, Vice President - Cyber Security, Confidential

• Muath AlHomoud, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Saudi Central Bank - SAMA
• Wael Fattouh, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Bank Aljazira
• Dr. Marc Dacier, Professor of Computer Science (CS) and Associate Director of the Resilience Computing and Cybersecurity Research Center (RC3), KAUST
• Ibrahim Al Asaker, Cloud Security Architect & Saudi Chapter Leader, Cloud Security Alliance – CSA

• Evaluating Recovery Point Objective (PRO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) based on business necessities, compliance requirements, and estimated revenue loss caused by downtime to identify the suitable disaster recovery model
• Importance of Cloud SLA to guarantee governance of data recovery and warranty for promised services
• Enhancing failover and failback processes using automation systems to ensure business continuity and eliminate pressure on IT departments
• Database virtualization and data compression to decrease storage costs and extend system flexibility

• Eng. Hameed Alzahrani, IT Consultant and Director of IT Infrastructure & Operations, Technical and Vocational Training Corporation -TVTC

Capitalizing on cloud services and solutions

• Industry insight 1
• Industry insight 2

• Maximizing interoperability and portability of migrated data and workloads among multiple cloud environments
• Automating processes, including security monitoring, to eliminate human errors in system configuration
• Overcoming data silos, unnecessary costs, and complex workflows through a unified data integration solution
• Zero compromises on business needs and enhancing flexibility in managing daily operations
• Balancing global server loads and mechanisms to handle the flow of traffic between multiple sites

• Omar Alfantoukh, Digital Transformation Consultant
• Moaz Al Sibaai, Chief Digital Officer, Alfanar
• Mousa Al-Anizi, VP Digital Health, Director E-Health, King Saud Medical City

• Centralizing management of resources such as data, storage, servers, and virtualization using compact integration solutions
• Accelerating performance rate through creating a reliable and stable operating environment using hyper-integrated building blocks
• Processing big data workloads via efficient workflows, first-rate operations, backup, and disaster recovery deployment

• Testing, integrating, and validating containers and capacity planning for production requirements
• Best practices to facilitate the transition to cloud
• Automating reporting of issues and rebooting processes in case of failure of new deployments
• Incorporating continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) framework with serverless architectures
• Addressing orchestration challenges including complexity, cultural changes, and security

• Omar Mahgoub, Senior Cloud Architect

• Addressing the demand for Saudi expertise in ICT sector and required key measures including excessive training and structured development programs
• Key emerging positions in the field of cloud computing, data migration and storage infrastructure
• The role of academic institutions in developing relevant curriculum to match the demand for technology expertise in the market
• Tackling the divergence between classroom taught material and skills required in the field
• Empowering Saudi talents by developing and showcasing clear paths for career growth in technical departments

• Dr. Adnan Mustafa Albar, Associate Professor, Faculty of Computing, Chairman of Saudi Scientific Society of Information Technology, King AbdulAziz University

• Khaled S. Salem, Chief Digital Information Officer, Saudi Fransi Leasing
• Hussain Alkalifah, Head of IT infrastructure and Operation, Saudi Export-Import Bank - Saudi EXIM
• Hamed Alqahtani, Chief Information Officer, King Khalid University