Mumtalakat leads Kingdom’s cloud migration drive

Manama, Aug. 15 (BNA): Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company (Mumtalakat), the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Bahrain, announced the completion of its cloud services migration to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Bahrain data centres, the first in the Middle East. The first government institution to complete this migration in Bahrain, the move by Mumtakalat comes on the heels of the recent establishment of three data centres (on 30th July) in Bahrain by AWS to offer cloud storage to regional organisations amid growing demand in the Middle East. This latest migration allows Mumtalakat to reduce its usage of international data centres while improving the speed and resilience of its information technology services. Mumtalakat Information Technology team undertook the migration immediately after the opening of the local AWS data centres and oversaw the process for both Mumtalakat and Bahrain Real Estate Investment (Edamah) - a Mumtalakat’s real estate investment subsidiary. ‘The entire migration process was handled in-house by my team,’ explained Mohamed Sater, Mumtalakat’s Head of Information Technology. ‘This is the main advantage of having a capable and trained team to handle the migration activity, speeding up the migration and ensuring high quality service. Our software is now running in Bahrain, with a lower latency and faster speed. This was done with minimal downtime for our users.’ ‘We have cut down our technology operational costs by over 50% as data backup, storage and security costs have declined considerably. Our partnership with AWS has been both fruitful and reliable,’ he added. This marks the latest in a series of firsts by the Mumtalakat Information Technology team who have been supporting their counterparts across the Group in Bahrain in their adoption of the Government of Bahrain’s Cloud First policy and the migration of their digital infrastructure to cloud-based solutions.