With VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, iGA Bahrain delivers a cloud-like experience on-premises, providing a secure sovereign cloud experience for government and public sector customers while storing non-sensitive data on VMware Cloud in the AWS Bahrain Region. You can now host it on .
Bahrain Information and e-Government Authority iGA is on a mission to enable a new era of smart government in Saudi Arabia. iGA is the umbrella organization for all public sector institutions in Bahrain and provides digital services to the government, including hosting, operating and managing government systems.
The services provided by iGA are effectively the country’s digital backbone, serving all government and public sectors, including healthcare, education, and all types of infrastructure, in addition to large-scale infrastructure such as Bahrain International Airport, King Fahd Causeway, and ports. covers organizations. We provide services for businesses, citizens, residents and visitors.
Conventional problems
iGA faced a number of challenges in developing a strategy towards the government’s goals. The organization has had about 75% of its workloads in the public cloud since about 2017, but the remaining 25% of sensitive and critical workloads are kept on-premises, with a separate on-premises facility for disaster recovery. It was prepared.
There was little coordination between cloud and on-premises workloads, which increased complexity, especially when workloads needed to be moved between the two. This setup also requires significant resources to manage and maintain, requiring iGA to become more agile to expand capacity and provide new services and solutions to government departments. did.
Additionally, if iGA wanted to double down on the same approach and expand its on-premises infrastructure to achieve its goals, it would expand its team to manage and maintain it, increasing efficiency while controlling costs. This would counter the government’s goal of
Dr. Khalid Ahmed Almutawah, iGA’s Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Operations and Governance, said: “Traditional data center operations are labor-intensive and difficult to optimize operations. One of the problems is that we are focusing on the health of our infrastructure rather than proactively supporting customer innovation. The lack of integration with public cloud resources also hampered our ability to serve our customers and provide them with the flexibility they needed. It had been done.”
Setting up disaster recovery also had risks. iGA was using a manual solution that required a minimum of 6 hours to boot. This could result in end-user data and service loss in the event of a disaster. In the worst-case scenario, IT outages can occur in mission-critical environments such as hospitals, transportation infrastructure, and border security.
Hybrid cloud with DR
The pandemic is just one example of a crisis that has put pressure on government departments and services, especially healthcare, and highlighted the need for agile ICT systems. iGA’s team realized that as conditions changed suddenly, his IT department needed to be able to respond seamlessly to maintain operations.
iGA was already familiar with VMware and was using the technology to run some components of its existing cloud deployment. This has led organizations to consider adopting a more comprehensive hybrid cloud approach using VMware. iGA chose to implement a complete hybrid cloud solution with VMware, including migrating remaining on-premises workloads and recovery sites to a sovereign cloud solution that is fully integrated with public cloud workloads.
iGA, a leading provider of digital services to government agencies, has the most secure, flexible, efficient, and agile solutions available and the ability to deliver secure sovereign cloud services, disaster recovery, and DR as a service. I needed it. For iGA, having a flexible cloud infrastructure and cloud management capabilities was essential to delivering secure cloud services such as sovereign cloud and disaster recovery to end users.
To achieve this, iGA introduced a hybrid cloud platform consisting of integrated VMware solutions, including VMware Aria Universal Suite. iGA chose to deploy VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts to provide a fully managed sovereign cloud solution for its on-premises workloads. Deployed VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Site Recovery to maximize user availability and ensure business continuity.
Orchestration success
With VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, iGA delivers a cloud-like experience on-premises, giving customers a secure sovereign cloud experience. Meanwhile, non-sensitive data can be stored and managed in VMware Cloud on AWS Bahrain Region. iGA uses VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery to protect your data and applications in the most efficient way possible.
This solution is available as a SaaS solution and helps iGA efficiently protect your data and services. This is especially useful when supporting government users whose requirements may change suddenly. To quickly return sites to normal operations in disaster recovery scenarios, iGA Bahrain also deployed his VMware Site Recovery to enable rapid replication and restoration of on-premises components of the iGA cloud infrastructure.
iGA used VMware Aria Universal Suite, a SaaS management suite, to achieve consistent operations and optimization across its infrastructure and applications, from on-premises data centers to the edge and cloud. This allows iGA to offer customers the flexibility to deploy on-premises or SaaS for a consistent hybrid and multi-cloud management experience.
Customer benefits
iGA enables government customers to innovate and improve reliability by delivering a cloud experience across all workloads through a combination of on-premises and public cloud. This allows agencies to save significant IT costs by using only the capacity they need and reducing the need for routine maintenance. These solutions, including VMware Aria Universal Suite, will enable iGA to focus on higher value-add activities while aligning with the government’s cloud-first strategy.
By implementing VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Site Recovery, iGA and its servicing agencies have peace of mind that all services are highly available. In the event of a disaster, such as damage to your on-premises data center, you can reassign workloads and maintain the end-user experience with little visible impact.
Accelerating digital transformation
iGA is passionate about helping government agencies get the most out of new platforms by having hybrid cloud infrastructure and systems in place and developing, managing, and maintaining modern applications from the cloud. . To help government agencies further modernize their apps, iGA is exploring the idea of deploying VMware Tanzu solutions.
“We want to encourage people to develop applications using tools like Kubernetes and containerization, which can help improve and optimize applications while increasing efficiency. , in many ways represents an evolution of what we’ve already achieved,” says Almutawa.
“The iGA team is excited to build on the momentum achieved to date and continue to support the Bahrain Government in achieving its e-Government Strategy goals of delivering superior digital services and driving economic diversity and prosperity. I’m excited,” Almutawa said.
iGA VMware footprint in Bahrain
- VMware Aria Universal Suite
- VMware Cloud on AWS
- VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts
- VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery
- VMware site recovery
iGA has introduced a hybrid cloud platform consisting of integrated VMware solutions, including VMware Aria Universal Suite. iGA chose to deploy VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts to provide a managed sovereign cloud solution for its on-premises workloads. Deployed VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Site Recovery to maximize user availability and ensure business continuity. To help government agencies further modernize their applications, iGA is exploring the idea of implementing his VMware Tanzu solution.
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