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iGA’s Chief Executive, Mohammed Ali
AlQaed, said: “Bahrain is committed to
becoming a country in the cloud and we
will be able to accelerate our journey with
the launch of the AWS Region in Bahrain.
By December of this year, we will have 30%
of all 72 government entities migrated to
AWS and by June 2020, we expect to have
most government data centres shut down,
while the rest are minimised allowing us to
focus resources on projects that benefit our
citizens and dramatically improve the overall
availability and durability of government
applications and data.”
An example of a government entity that
turned to the agility and speed of AWS is
Bahrain’s National Bureau of Revenue (NBR),
which needed to quickly and efficiently launch
the country’s Value Added Tax (VAT) system.
Rana Faqihi, Assistant Undersecretary
for Development and Revenue Policies at
Bahrain Ministry of Finance, said: “The
National Bureau of Revenue needed a
solution that would enable a seamless VAT
rollout, without delays and with the highest
levels of security. By launching SAP S/4 Hana
on AWS, the NBR was able to go to market in
www.intelligentcio.com
“
WE WILL NOW BE
ABLE TO BENEFIT
FROM DATA
CENTRES WITH
LOWER LATENCY
IN THE REGION.
just under two months while lowering costs
by 40%. Eliminating the need to manage
IT infrastructure allowed us to focus on
successfully reaching an important milestone
in Bahrain’s economic development.
“The launch of the new AWS Region in
Bahrain is allowing public and private sector
organisations to realise the full potential of
the cloud.”
The most well-known and fastest growing
businesses in the Middle East are also
choosing AWS to launch and grow. Careem
started working with AWS in 2012 to help
Dr Werner Vogels,
CTO Amazon.com,
on stage discussing
AWS’s opening of the
new Bahrain region
it scale fast and wide across 14 countries in
under seven years. Careem currently hosts
33 million customers and one million drivers
on its platform and has expanded its services
to offer on demand deliveries as well as its
original core business of ride hailing.
Magnus Olsson, Chief Experience Officer
and co-founder of Careem, said: “When
we started building Careem, we knew that
the ability to scale fast, and in a secure and
reliable way, would be critical to our long-
term success. As one of AWS’s early adopters
in the region, we have grown with them.
Thanks to AWS, we have been able to focus
our efforts on geographical and new vertical
expansion and to innovate new technologies
and services.
“With the opening of the new AWS Middle
East Region, we will now be able to benefit
from data centres with lower latency in the
region. AWS’s commitment to our region
shows the enormous potential of the local
technology scene and will be instrumental
to the success of the new wave of start-ups
to come. We look forward to having them
as a strong contributor to the Middle East
tech ecosystem.” n
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