Penta delivers private cloud, cybersecurity, to Dubai’s DIFC clients

Penta delivers private cloud, cybersecurity, to Dubai’s DIFC clients

Penta was cloud before there was cloud.

The technology company, with offices in Geneva and Dubai, began operations in 1996 when cloud computing had not entered the technology lexicon. The company was referred to as an application service provider (ASP) at the time.

"We have been operating a pay-as-you-use model, or SaaS as we know it today, since inception,“ explains Farhad Khalilnia, CEO of Penta.

The challenge at that time was to make organisations trust their data could be securely hosted by third parties. "This challenge doesn't exist anymore because cloud has become ubiquitous,“ says Khalilnia.

Khalilnia says Penta occupies a niche space in private cloud services, where it's not competing with dominant public cloud players such as Amazon or Microsoft. "The customer knows exactly where the data is sitting,