Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat Holding Company (Mumtalakat) has closed down its own data centres and migrated the firm’s entire information technology (IT) infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the subsidiary of US-based Amazon.com that offers cloud-based services.

According to an official statement, the migration to a cloud-based platform is expected to result in a 50 per cent reduction in data backup, storage and security costs.

“The migration allows the company to run its servers anywhere in the world, significantly reducing the need to maintain and upgrade hardware and providing a variety of improved security products at a lower cost, while increasing productivity,” the statement said.

The move is in line with the firm’s digital strategy, says Mahmood Alkooheji, Mumtalat CEO.

MEED understands Mumtalakat is the first company in Bahrain to move its entire IT infrastructure to AWS’ platform.

AWS is building three new data centres in Bahrain, part of its global infrastructure that provides 55 “availability zones” in 18 geographic regions globally.

Availability zones are clusters of isolated and independent locations that host customer data and other resources around a specific geographical area.

The data centres are expected to become operational in 2019.

The new facility in Bahrain will give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in the Middle East with lower latency.

AWS earlier opened offices in Bahrain and Dubai.

AWS counts Flydubai, MBC Broadcasting, ride-hailing service Careem, and startups such as Fetchr, Payfort and Dubizzle among its clients in the region.

Its parent company, Amazon, acquired Dubai-headquartered Souq.com in March last year.