Nayatel builds Pakistan-based public cloud service to rival global market leaders

In recent years, public cloud adoption has been a major trend for businesses all over the world – and Pakistan is no exception.

Organisations throughout the country are increasingly looking to leverage the economics, scalability, and convenience of the cloud, with growing appetite for infrastructure-as-a-service, applicationsas-a-service, and containers-as-a-service. However, when it comes to choosing a public cloud provider, options are limited.

Jahanzeb, VP Operations at Nayatel, explains: “The cloud ecosystem in Pakistan is relatively underdeveloped. There are a number of providers, but their services are either prohibitively expensive or unable to deliver the technical capabilities that people expect. As a result, we had a lot of customers approach us and say they were being forced to use cloud providers outside Pakistan.”

While leading global public cloud vendors are able to offer cost effective, mature cloud services to Pakistani customers, those services also come with major shortcomings. For highly security conscious businesses such as financial institutions, having sensitive data hosted outside of the country was problematic; geographically distant data centres can lead to unacceptably high latency; and out-of-country support often leaves much to be desired.

There was a clear need for an accessible, enterprise-grade public cloud service based within Pakistan itself – and Nayatel set its sights on filling that gap.

“We already had a small public cloud and virtual machine hosting offering,” continues Jahanzeb. “But it wasn’t sufficiently mature, and we lacked the in-house expertise to rebuild the architecture in a timely fashion. If we were going to get a sophisticated public cloud in place quickly, we needed an experienced partner."