KFH digitally transforms data storage and data protection with Dell EMC
KFH partners with ITS and Dell EMC to support rapid data growth Bank aims to save $1m over a 3-year period
KUWAIT: Dell EMC, yesterday announced that Kuwait Finance House (KFH), a global pioneer in Islamic Banking, has selected Dell EMC’s Data Protection Solution to create a highly scalable infrastructure to support rapid data growth.
The project was managed by International Turnkey Systems (ITS), the leading integrated information technology provider for Islamic financial solutions and a strategic Dell EMC partner in the region. KFH aims to leverage the unmatched flexibility, agile performance, enterprise-ready protection and recovery capabilities offered by this solution to achieve an increased level of data availability and facilitate a superior banking experience.
Serving customers across the GCC, Asia, and Europe through over 480 branches, KFH is driven by massive volumes of data - retained on backup tapes. To keep pace with the demands of the digital age, KFH optimizes the user-generated data to offer diversified financial services and solutions. To meet this end, IT forms the backbone for KFH’s data-driven operations, ensuring uninterrupted provision of services to its customers across the globe. With data expected to further grow at an exponential rate, resilient cloud-enabled protection storage with effective backup, archive and disaster recovery features is critical to power the ambitious vision fostered by the leading financial institution. To balance the needs between capacity, capability and advanced protection, KFH selected Dell EMC solution to start its journey toward tapeless solutions by expanding the existing Dell EMC backup to disk solution. By deploying this solution at its major data centers, KFH aims to migrate its traditional data protection system and switch over to a tapeless backup system, gradually reducing their exposure to the risk of data loss. This tapeless solution will provide simplicity, cost optimization and will address risks, compliance and data sovereignty concerns associated with any potential data loss due to tape-centric issues.
With the deployment completed, KFH intends to drive the efficiency of data recovery to the highest level, eliminate usage of tape backup by limiting human intervention in backup and recovery operations and save approximately $1 million over a three year period in storage management.
Group Chief Information Officer at KFH, Srood Sherif said: “As a leader spearheading Islamic financial services worldwide, KFH has always been committed to providing its everexpanding customer base with frontline products and services - which can be obstructed by a lack of real-time data access.
Data Protection solutions by Dell EMC helps ensure that our present storage infrastructure not only facilitates roundthe-clock data availability but also extends a high level of data protection and recovery at the speed of our business. Hence, we are extremely glad to be working with Dell EMC to realize our vision of becoming the most sustainable and profitable Islamic bank in the world.”
Fahad Al-Rashdan, Regional Director at International Turnkey Systems Group (ITS) sad: “(ITS) has developed and refined its award winning technology for Islamic bank and financial institutions for over 36 years. Our extensive industry experience helped us identify Dell EMC’s Data Protection Suite as the solution that would deliver a superior banking experience for KFH. With this new implementation, KFH will further upgrade its banking system to unlock new enterprise capabilities and better serve its customer’s needs.”
Meanwhile, Habib Mahakian, Vice President, Gulf at Dell EMC said: “We are immensely pleased to be working with an innovation-led financial institution such as the Kuwait Financial House and supporting them with their objective of creating a strong foundation for data growth. At Dell EMC, we aim to ensure that by leveraging our Data Protection Solutions, KFH is able to protect its critical data and optimize the protection and availability of its IT environment to deliver cutting-edge services and deliver the highest level of customer service.”