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| Source: BIOS. Dominic Docherty, Founder and MD, BIOS Middle East (left) and Mohammad AlHawari, Executive Board Member, Takaful Emarat-Insurance (right). |
Dubai-based Takaful Emarat's tech refresh replaced much of its legacy IT infrastructure, allowing the company to remain competitive in a challenging marketplace. Key among Takaful Emarat's requirements was an in-country cloud infrastructure, which could leverage various technologies for a complex IT environment. Takaful Emarat chose to work with BIOS' in-country cloud, CloudHPT.
Mohammad Alhawari, Takaful Emarat's MD and Executive Board Member commented: "This is a very exciting time for Takaful Emarat as we continue focus on growing our business in tandem with accelerating our digital and online capabilities as we access new customer markets.
"Our investment in technology is central to this objective and, will give us a competitive edge to strengthen our market position, as a leading UAE provider of innovative insurance products and services. From a customer perspective, our new IT infrastructure will also enable our business to provide optimal value through improved business efficiencies and enhanced customer service support. We will continue to invest in our business to drive growth and I look forward to reporting new initiatives in due course."
Dominic Docherty, Chairman, BIOS agreed, saying, "Even in traditional sectors such as insurance, customers expect modern technological capabilities. Strategic positioning through superior technology is critical for Takaful Emarat's continued success."
Takaful Emarat's new technology includes a complete infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) package, which features hosting for Takaful's core insurance application of Oracle and critical services such as the file server, the contact centre. BIOS will migrate Takaful Emarat's email Office 365 setup, with complete email security and archiving provided through Mimecast. These critical improvements will increase Takaful Emarat's operational efficiency with BIOS' powerful platform.
BIOS is also building a disaster recovery solution that replicates workloads at Takaful Emarat's offices on their old hardware. This provides further cost savings on infrastructure, while lowering risk and improving industry compliance.
As with any technological upgrade, information security was a major concern for Takaful Emarat. To protect their assets, BIOS leveraged CloudHPT, which offers the region's first security information and event management (SIEM)-protected cloud with 24x7 security operations centre (SOC) services. CloudHPT is also fully protected by 1TB of anti-distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, which no other local cloud service vendor provides, BIOS said.
Built on Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), CloudHPT is the only Cisco-powered cloud in the Middle East. This secure platform is supported by BIOS' 24x7 network operations centre, which monitors all infrastructure around the clock.
Lalitha Prasad Rao, COO, Takaful Emarat said: "Our technology refresh is a critical investment for our business. It will improve daily operations and reduce IT spend by increasing efficiency through technological improvement, offering us a key market advantage over our in-region competition."