Omani firms can adopt AI while keeping data at home

MUSCAT, JULY 2

Enterprises in Oman can deploy Google’s artificial intelligence tools without breaching the Sultanate of Oman’s data residency rules by keeping their information stored locally even as it is processed in the cloud, a senior Google Cloud executive has said.

Speaking at the Ooredoo Google Cloud Forum in Muscat on Sunday, Cynthia Layous, Regional Sales Manager at Google Cloud, said the company was working with businesses to reconcile strict national data laws with the demands of AI adoption.

“We are offering Gemini out of the public cloud, so it is not available in Oman today”, she said. “However, data can still be stored on-premises in Muscat while being processed on the cloud”, adding that security solutions could be tailored “to close the gap between what is required by the regulation and for us not to stop the innovation”.

Layous said Google’s competitive edge lay in controlling its technology end to end.

“The biggest advantage of Google is that we own the full stack, from infrastructure up to application”, she said, pointing to the company’s in-house Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) that power its Gemini models alongside graphics processing units and a worldwide network of data centres. “The elasticity of cloud is definitely what is fuelling AI”, she added.

For corporate clients, she said, Gemini could be connected to a company’s internal systems while keeping that information walled off from Google’s own model training.

“Today we can connect Gemini to your internal data sources... and this is definitely not being used to train our own models, but it is going to be trained for your own tenants within the company”, she said.