SOLIDARITY SAUDI TAKAFUL COMPANY
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“ Optane will help us with configuring faster calculation engines , web applications , data access and anything that requires advanced caching facilities ”
— Raid Bakri , CIO , Solidarity
in the local Saudi Insurance industry . “ Previously , no one really considered Solidarity as one of the key players in the market ,” explains Bakri . “ However now , I believe the outlook has changed , mainly because our competitors have taken notice of the decrease in their online market shares in specific segments , this is due to the online services and platforms we have launched . In some segments , we ’ ve been able to capture a 30-40 % market share online in less than a year .” Despite the rise of the cloud , Bakri says his company has no immediate plans to move all of its services over . “ One of the key things we had to do was evaluate our infrastructure and really determine what we have and how to optimise our capacity ,” he says . “ There is a lot of talk around the cloud , and of course the cloud is important , but there are regulations that don ’ t allow us to transition there easily . I don ’ t really see much cost optimisation in moving everything to the cloud because it ’ s still a niche set up in Saudi Arabia . The cost would end up costing organisations more as opposed to hosting your own infrastructure on-premise . And it was decided to bring the cloud on-premise ”
Instead , Bakri believes in partnerships and has the drive to look closer to home and upgrade current processes . “ I partnered with several local vendors that I have good experience with and we launched a project to upgrade our current infrastructure . We went with hyper-converged infrastructure ( HCI )
JUNE 2020