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Mouteih Chaghlil, Chief Cloud Officer at e& enterprise, on how the UAE’s sovereign cloud model aims to unlock AI innovation without losing national control.
As governments and regulated industries across the Middle East accelerate cloud adoption, the UAE is advancing a sovereign model that reconciles innovation with security, compliance, and national oversight. Speaking to MIT Sloan Management Review Middle East, Mouteih Chaghlil, Chief Cloud Officer at e& enterprise, outlines the thinking behind the UAE Sovereign Cloud Launchpad, developed jointly with Amazon Web Services.
He explained why sovereignty is increasingly required, especially in the age of AI, drawing a parallel between personal data privacy and national data control. As AI workloads scale and become more sensitive, governments want the benefits of cloud innovation without relinquishing authority over where data resides or how it is governed.
Rather than treating compliance as a static, one-time exercise, the Launchpad embeds it into the platform’s architecture. The platform provides continuous monitoring, real-time logging, and a single pane of glass that allows organisations to track compliance and remediate deviations as regulations evolve.
Crucially, Chaghlil stresses that sovereignty is not only a technical challenge but also a human one. Training, operational readiness, and process design are built into the Launchpad to ensure organisations can adopt cloud and AI technologies with confidence.
In the video, Chaghlil touches upon:
- Why data sovereignty is becoming non-negotiable in the AI era
- How the sovereign cloud architecture separates infrastructure, data, and applications
- The importance of continuous compliance and real-time visibility
- Why skills, training, and people readiness are as critical as technology.
