Kuwait Finance House Selects Dell EMC

Kuwait’s Islamic Bank, Kuwait Finance House (KFH) has selected Dell EMC’s data protection solution to create a scalable infrastructure to support data growth.

The project was managed by International Turnkey Systems (ITS), an integrated IT provider for Islamic financial solutions and a Dell EMC partner in the region.

KFH aims to leverage the 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 which is retained on backup tapes. TKFH optimises 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 DR features is critical to power the ambitious vision fostered by the 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 centres, 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.

“As a leader spearheading Islamic financial services worldwide, KFH has always been committed to providing its ever-expanding 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 round-the-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 realise our vision of becoming the most sustainable and profitable Islamic bank in the world,” said Srood Sherif, Group CIO, KFH.

He added that ITS has developed and refined its technology for Islamic banks and other financial institutions for over 36 years and industry experience helped identify Dell EMC’s data protection suite as the solution that would deliver a superior banking experience for KFH. With this implementation, KFH will further upgrade its banking system to unlock new enterprise capabilities and better serve its customer’s needs.

“We are immensely pleased to be working with an innovation-led financial institution such as the KFH 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 optimise the protection and availability of its IT environment to deliver cutting-edge services and deliver the highest level of customer service,” said Fahad Al Rashdan, regional director, ITS.