In a bid to accelerate the rapid adoption of cloud computing in the Middle East, Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday announced plans to open an office in Dubai on January 1. The office will support organisations of all sizes, from start-ups to government institutions and some of the Middle East’s historic and most established enterprises, as they make the transition to the AWS Cloud. It will be set up with the support of the Dubai Investment Development Agency (Dubai FDI), an agency of the Department of Economic Development (DED) in Dubai. Middle Eastern organisations were amongst the earliest adopters of cloud services when AWS launched in 2006. Customers are using AWS to run everything from development and test environments to Big Data analytics, from mobile, web and social applications to enterprise business applications and mission critical workloads. AWS counts some of the UAE businesses like Dubizzle, PayFort and Careem, government institutions, budget carrier flydubai, Souq.com and Middle East Broadcasting Center.