HE Shaikh Khalid bin Abdulla Al Khalifa, Deputy Prime Minister, and Chairman of Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company (Mumtalakat), the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Bahrain, witnessed the successful shift of the company’s IT infrastructure to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and the closure of its onsite and offsite data centres.
Mumtalakat is considered the first government-owned company in Bahrain that fully migrated all of its technology infrastructures to the cloud. This decision comes as it is in line with the Government’s Cloud First Policy. By moving to the cloud, Mumtalakat aims to use cloud computing to over better services that will, in turn, reduce costs and increase security and productivity.
According to Mumtalakat, moving to the cloud would lead to a reduction in their costs by more than 50% since data backup, storage and security costs would be cut. Additionally, the migration entails that the company would be running its servers anywhere in the world, which will significantly reduce the need to maintain and upgrade the hardware.
Mahmood H. Alkooheji, Chief Executive Officer of Mumtalakat commented on the shift saying: “We are proud to be the first company in Bahrain to migrate our entire IT infrastructure from legacy systems to the cloud-based offering of AWS. Increased operational efficiency and security are integral components of our digital strategy.”
AWS announced plans for the first Middle East infrastructure Region in the Kingdom in September 2017, which will consist of 3 Availability Zones once launched in early 2019 and will give AWS customers and partners across the region the ability to run their workloads and store their data in the Middle East with lower latency.