As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes the role of surveillance and operational monitoring across the Middle East, data infrastructure providers are increasingly positioning storage as a strategic foundation for digital resilience and smart-city innovation.
Video surveillance systems across the Middle East are generating unprecedented data volumes, and organisations are deploying AI-powered analytics at scale. Infrastructure strategy has become a critical enabler of both operational performance and sovereignty.
According to Sameer Bhatia, senior regional director for India, the Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Seagate Technology, industry engagement across the region has served as an important platform for accelerating collaboration across the wider security and infrastructure ecosystem, including systems integrators, solution providers and enterprise customers deploying AI-enabled video environments.
“Video is evolving from passive surveillance into searchable, decision-ready intelligence,” said Bhatia. “That transformation changes the requirements for the underlying data infrastructure, particularly around scale, resilience, retention and compliance.”
Bhatia said Seagate’s partnerships are centred on helping organisations manage the explosive growth of video data as AI adds metadata, summaries, analytics and operational context to every frame captured. “More than 75% of organisations expect their video data to at least double over the next five years. That is exactly why these collaborations matter now.”
UAE smart infrastructure ambitions create new opportunities
Bhatia said the United Arab Emirates (UAE) market presents significant growth opportunities as government and enterprise organisations continue investing in smart infrastructure, digital transformation and AI-driven operations.
“The UAE is investing ambitiously in smart infrastructure and national innovation. Our role is to help organisations build secure and scalable data foundations for AI-enabled video and sensor-driven environments,” he said.
“Our focus is on delivering storage platforms engineered for mission-critical workloads. That includes capabilities designed to support governance, auditability, security and long-life infrastructure planning”
Sameer Bhatia, Seagate Technology
Seagate is showcasing storage infrastructure designed to support AI-powered video analytics across use cases, including smart city surveillance, retail operations and critical infrastructure monitoring. Bhatia added that the company continues to emphasise architectures that support local control of sensitive data, particularly in regulated and mission-critical environments.
“Data sovereignty, governance and compliance are increasingly important requirements for organisations operating critical infrastructure and public sector services,” he said.
Supporting public sector resilience and governance
Bhatia explained that Seagate works with the public sector through a broader ecosystem of enterprise partners, systems integrators and customers supporting government-adjacent and critical sector environments. Public sector organisations globally are dealing with rapidly expanding volumes of sensitive data, ranging from citizen records and archives to telemetry generated by smart infrastructure platforms.
“Our focus is on delivering storage platforms engineered for mission-critical workloads,” Bhatia explained. “That includes capabilities designed to support governance, auditability, security and long-life infrastructure planning.”
He noted that the UAE’s national focus on innovation and smart city development closely aligns with the broader industry shift towards treating video and sensor data as a scalable intelligence layer rather than simply archived information.
AI drives new infrastructure requirements
According to Bhatia, enterprise and critical sector organisations are increasingly under pressure to retain larger volumes of data for longer periods while extracting operational insights more quickly and securely.
“AI is accelerating the transition from ‘record and review’ to ‘search, summarise and act’,” he said.
To support this shift, Seagate is helping customers build scalable edge-to-cloud data architectures capable of handling growing video workloads, including automated alerts, investigations, compliance requirements and operational analytics.
“Processing data closer to the edge helps reduce latency while supporting local control of sensitive information,” said Bhatia. “That is becoming increasingly important in regulated industries and critical infrastructure environments.”
One of the UAE’s strongest differentiators is the speed at which public and private sector stakeholders align around national technology objectives.
“As AI transforms passive data into operational intelligence, organisations will need coordinated ecosystem development across infrastructure, systems integration, governance and long-term capacity planning,” said Bhatia.
