Al Wathba Insurance Completes AWS Migration Within 100 Days, Reducing Maintenance Costs by 30%
With support from the AWS team, we’ve laid the groundwork for innovation. We’re not just running our infrastructure in the cloud. We’re building our company’s future on AWS.
Kishore Sivaprakasam
Head of IT, Al Wathba InsuranceOverview
With a strong foothold in the insurance industry, Al Wathba Insurance wasn’t afraid to set ambitious goals. The company had a bold vision: to grow 5 times within 5 years.
However, scalability was important to support this growth, and business continuity was nonnegotiable. The migration had to be fast, cost efficient, and not disruptive.
So, the company migrated its entire on-premises data center infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in just 100 days. Now, it’s developing faster thanks to its increased agility and enhancing the customer experience, all while saving money.
About Al Wathba Insurance
Al Wathba Insurance is a multiline insurance company and risk partner located in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Since 1996, it has offered insurance services for individual, family, and corporate clients.
Efficiently Migrating from an On-Premises Data Center to AWS
Al Wathba Insurance, a leading multiline insurer based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), sought to accelerate its growth by adopting a more scalable infrastructure that could seamlessly support its ambitious expansion goals. “We needed to make sure that our infrastructure could handle the excessive load of transactions and all the data that we would migrate,” says Muralikrishnan R, CFO at Al Wathba Insurance.
Al Wathba Insurance decided to migrate to the cloud. It assessed several providers, ultimately selecting AWS for its range of services. It worked with an AWS Partner to set up a landing zone in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region and began migrating noncritical systems, learning from the AWS team. When it was time to migrate its mission-critical applications, the process was seamless. “This was beyond a cloud migration. It was a strategic transformation,” says Kishore Sivaprakasam, head of IT at Al Wathba Insurance.
Accelerating Feature Deployments by 40 Percent to Improve the Customer Experience
Al Wathba Insurance migrated 60 servers with more than 20 applications in 100 days—on schedule and under budget, with no downtime. “We worked with the AWS team and our implementation partner to have minimal impact on customers,” says Aon Raza, head of transformation at Al Wathba Insurance.
The company has reduced data center maintenance costs by 30 percent and accelerated backup and recovery by 60 percent using AWS services, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a simple-to-manage relational database service. It has achieved 99.9 percent uptime, giving customers a reliable experience. It has also accelerated new feature deployments by 40 percent and eliminated 40 percent of manual work. Using AWS, Al Wathba Insurance is saving more than 100,000 UAE dirham (AED) per year that it can reinvest in the services it offers to customers.
The company uses AWS global infrastructure to comply with UAE data residency requirements by using the AWS UAE Region and implemented AWS services to restrict data access and maintain compliance. A key service is AWS Security Hub, which prioritizes critical security issues. “AWS Security Hub helped us make sure that all our servers, instances, and security are in line with standards,” says Raja Karunanidhi, manager of application development and security at Al Wathba Insurance.
Optimizing Infrastructure to Support Growth
Al Wathba Insurance is on track to achieve its growth goals on AWS. “On AWS, we have unlocked long-term value, improved scalability, strengthened security, and enhanced capabilities across all our systems,” says Sivaprakasam.
In 2024, the company grew 94 percent and saved 500,000 AED that it would’ve spent on scaling on-premises data centers and servers. The company will continue using AWS to enhance its security, reliability, and performance. “With support from the AWS team, we’ve laid the groundwork for innovation,” says Sivaprakasam. “We’re not just running our infrastructure in the cloud. We’re building our company’s future on AWS.”