News

Zoho Opens First UAE Data Centers For Local Cloud Solutions

The new Dubai and Abu Dhabi sites are part of an AED 100 million investment in the UAE that hopes to answer data sovereignty demands.

Published

5 months ago

January 14, 2026

Nour Nasir

Zoho

Zoho Corporation has opened its first UAE data centers, a Dubai – Abu Dhabi deployment that lets the software group host more than 100 cloud products locally. The sites span Zoho’s business apps and its enterprise brand ManageEngine, and sit within an AED 100 million investment pledge the firm made to the country in 2023.

Co-founder and CEO Shailesh Davey called the launch part of a wider commitment to the market, saying the centers would let customers “store their data locally, strengthening data sovereignty, and supporting National Cybersecurity Agenda”. He also linked the move to digital goals under Dubai Vision 2030.

Certification from the Dubai Electronic Security Center clears Zoho to serve government and semi-government work. The facilities also carry ISO 27001, ISO 22301, ISO 27017 and CSA STAR Level 2 compliance marks. Zoho’s Dubai office holds ISO 27001. For public buyers across the GCC, these stamps are becoming non-negotiable as cloud procurement tightens.

The UAE has been a growth engine for the company. Zoho reported 38.7% expansion in 2025, a 29% lift in partners and a 35% bump in headcount. Customer-experience tools, VAT-compliant accounting software, low-code development and collaboration suites led adoption. Over five years, the firm has invested AED 80 million to help more than 7,000 local businesses through deals with entities such as the Department of Economy and Tourism and Dubai Culture, pushing harder into enterprise accounts, which jumped 48% last year.

Also Read: Abu Dhabi Rolls Out Barq Ultra-Fast EV Chargers

Meanwhile, ManageEngine logged 20% growth in the UAE in 2025. Demand came from financial services, government and manufacturing. Adoption of its endpoint management, service management and observability products tracked a broader shift to cloud-first architectures, with hosted services growing around 35%. Davey said the combined portfolio would enable businesses of all sizes, and government and semi-government organizations adopt cloud technology for digital transformation in nearly every area of operation.

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Instagram Now Lets You Tune Its Algorithm, But There’s One Big Catch

The new controls promise users “agency” over their feed, but asking to see more from accounts you actually follow returns an error.

Published

3 days ago

June 11, 2026

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Instagram has expanded its algorithm personalization feature to the main feed, letting users specify which topics they want surfaced more or less often in recommendations.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri framed the change as a matter of user control. “I believe it’s in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them, and that people should be able to have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in,” he wrote on Threads.

Though it turns out that agency has limits. The controls only accept interest-based topics, such as “rescue dogs” or “parenting humor”. Requesting “posts from people I follow” returns no results, which is obviously a sore point for creators whose posts rarely reach their own audiences. Mosseri conceded the tension: “Who you follow used to be a meaningful tool people had for shaping their own experience, and as recommendations took over the main feed that tool quietly stopped working”.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

Instagram credits large language models for making its algorithms legible enough to personalize, and says it is “actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more” – potentially leading to a fully “bespoke” version of the app.