Bahrain Islamic Bank (BisB) Sets Stage for ‘Seamless Banking’ Experiences with Nutanix Partnership

Nutanix announced that Bahrain Islamic Bank (BisB), the provider of Islamic digital banking services in the Kingdom of Bahrain, is standardising on Nutanix technology solutions to accelerate its digital transformation. The implementation of a wide suite of solutions from Nutanix resulted in 70% improvement in the performance and availability of critical workloads and 90% increase in the speed of backups which now complete in a matter of minutes. Provisioning time for databases has also reduced from five days to under an hour, and maintenance resource requirements cut by 75%.

From its heritage as Bahrain’s first Islamic bank, Bahrain Islamic Bank (BisB) continues to ‘challenge the ordinary’ through innovation and continuous development. It’s no surprise then that ‘Digitisation’ is one of the five pillars on which the bank has built its acclaimed brand. Being the sector’s vanguard requires BisB to constantly invest in its IT infrastructure which is the rock-solid foundation on which its innovations are built. So, when it became evident that traditional physical servers and storage were no longer up to the bank’s lofty performance benchmarks, and that maintenance was drawing resources away from innovation, a decision was made to give this environment an overhaul.

The Bank ran Nutanix in a test environment for a whole year in order to understand the technology’s impressive capabilities and get firsthand experience of its incredible performance and reliability, before deciding to invest in a full suite of solutions including Nutanix Database-as-a-Service (NDB), Nutanix Files, Nutanix Data Protection and Nutanix AHV.

Overhauling its IT infrastructure with Nutanix has translated to a huge reduction in the time required to provision databases. “Where previously we needed up to five days to provision a database cluster, we can now have this up and running in under an hour. So, if a business unit wants to develop and test a new application, we can rapidly support them, which ultimately means our bank can get innovations to market sooner,” said Ahmed Sami, Services and Delivery Lead at BisB.

Moreover, where the bank once required up to four dedicated engineers to carry out database provisioning, it now allocates just a single resource. “The impact on our ability to innovate is profound. These are precious IT manhours that we can redirect to high-value initiatives that drive business growth,” said Sami.

The performance of critical workloads such as Microsoft SQL that have been migrated to Nutanix has increased by an impressive 70%. The ease of management and expansion of the Nutanix environment has also eliminated the need for planned downtime.

The enhancement to the bank’s backup and recovery capabilities has been more than impressive. With performance having increased a whole 90%, the bank’s backup window has been reduced to mere minutes. This exceeds regulatory requirements and gives customers confidence that their hard-earned finances are safe and protected against the threat of cyber-attacks.

While the performance and ease of management of Nutanix’s solutions has impressed all stakeholders at BisB, for the IT team, the ‘best part of Nutanix’ shines through when they face challenges with other vendors. Whether it’s the Bank’s Oracle or Microsoft databases, Nutanix takes full ownership of troubleshooting. So now instead of multiple tickets and complicated remediation efforts, the IT team has a single support case that’s rapidly resolved by Nutanix’s world-class support team.

“Partnering with Nutanix was definitely the right decision for our bank. Their solutions and support will enable us to offer seamless banking experiences to our customers for the next decade,” said Sami.

Echoing the same sentiments, Ali Adel, Database Lead at BisB commented, “In Nutanix, we have found that rare technology partner that is uncompromisingly committed to our bank’s long-term success. We have every intention of completely standardising our infrastructure on Nutanix, so that we can get the value of other solutions available in their industry-leading portfolio.”