ShareKUWAIT: Gulf Bank, one of the leading financial institutions in Kuwait, yesterday announced their strategic agreement with Dell Technologies for a digitally transformative project. Taking significant steps towards sustaining business continuity and scalable data mobility, the bank will leverage industry-leading storage management and data protection solutions by Dell Technologies, to ensure maximum return on their investment.
This collaboration was announced at the Dell Technologies Forum held at Jumeirah Messilah' Beach Hotel in Kuwait. Themed 'Make it Real', this one-day free event brought together Dell Technologies' seven technology powerhouses together, to help organizations in Kuwait accelerate national and business transformation initiatives with speed and purpose.
Kuwait's strategic Vision 2035 centers on transforming the country into a world class financial hub, with the private sector leading economic activities, fostering competitiveness, and creating an enabling business environment. With this primary goal at the heart of their transformative efforts, Gulf Bank aims to be at the frontlines of emerging industry innovation and embrace data-driven banking - which is evolving as a key driver of operational and competitive differentiation.
To this end, Gulf Bank planned to modernize their IT infrastructure with a robust and flexible data management backbone that can effectively store and protect the growing volume of data from multiple sources. Therefore, this project with Dell Technologies is divided into two critical parts - data management and backup.
To realize efficient data management, continuous data availability, seamless mobility and accelerate data center modernization, Gulf Bank will leverage Dell Technologies VPLEX and RecoverPoint solutions. These solutions are purpose-built to ensure operational agility and flexibility to match IT infrastructure to the speed of changing business needs. In addition, VPLEX and RecoverPoint will help Gulf Bank expand their operations across 3 data centers in the future.
To comply with offshore data regulations set by Central Bank of Kuwait (CBK) and manage operational overhead costs for storing long term retention data on tapes, Gulf Bank has opted to deploy Data Domain and Deduplication technology to speed backups and reduce costs. These market-leading solutions by Dell Technologies will also help the bank to save valuable floor space, simplify operations, improve disaster recovery, reduce backup and recovery risks and importantly, enable a tapeless environment.
With this agreement, Gulf Bank alongside Dell Technologies aims to empower their business and propel their transformation journey to offer maximum value to their customers. Thereby making a concerted effort to support and help Kuwait realize its ambitious vision to become an economic powerhouse.
Dr Waleed Al-Hasawi, General Manager of Information Technology at Gulf Bank said, "To win today's market and ensure business sustainability, it is critical that financial institutions change their direction and elevate their pace of business innovation. Keeping this in mind, we at Gulf Bank wanted to set our foundation for the new digital era. To do this, our first step was to choose a trusted partner who could not only help us imagine our IT environment, but also help us as an organization to ensure effective outcomes. And, we hope our partnership with Dell Technologies enables us achieve this vision."
Havier Haddad, General Manager - Gulf at Dell Technologies, said, "It is always great to see established organizations look at technology as a platform to uncover the answers of tomorrow. Therefore, we are pleased to be a part of the transformation journey embarked by Gulf Bank. Their vision to modernize and simplify data management to unlock new enterprise capabilities and offer more value to their customer, is something we advocate completely. We look forward to helping Gulf Bank build a benchmark by being fully committed to investing our expertise in this relationship."
