Jisr Delivers Leading Software-as-a-Service Solution for HR in Saudi Arabia with Modernized Platform Built on AWS

Founded in 2016, Jisr provides a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based human resources platform in Saudi Arabia. Called Jisr HR, the platform started as a human resources (HR) management system to streamline human resources operations and support compliance with Saudi Labor Law. Over time, Jisr evolved the SaaS platform into an HR ecosystem to support all HR-related operations, including payroll management, recruitment, medical insurance, attendance and leaves, and performance evaluation in one location.

The Jisr HR platform has run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) since it went live. From the beginning, the platform applications have leveraged Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, with managed services including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL providing highly secure performance at scale.

The company wanted to modernize its SaaS infrastructure using containers to become more agile, innovate faster, and save on infrastructure costs. Moreover, containerization offered certain security advantages such as isolating applications and simplified management. Mohammed Akkar, CEO, says, “We’re a B2B company heavily focused on our customers’ needs. Moving to containers aligned with our strategy of continuous product improvement.”

Jisr re-architected applications as microservices running in Kubernetes containers on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. The Jisr team also implemented Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to simplify administration, eliminating the need for a separate Kubernetes control plane on AWS. Mohammed Aldubaykil, SaaS Architect, states, “Amazon EKS requires hardly any management support. Our developers can concentrate on our SaaS features and services for our customers.”

By moving to microservices, the IT team freed up time to focus on innovation. “Without AWS, we would have needed to dedicate up to 40% percent more resource to infrastructure administration,” says Aldubaykil. “We have a greater opportunity to develop our applications.”

Besides simplifying management, modernization has also strengthened security, which is vital since Jisr's SaaS platform integrates with customer data. Jisr HR is supported by AWS WAF, a firewall protecting web applications from common exploits, and uses other AWS services, including AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM), and Amazon GuardDuty. “Being on AWS helps ensure compliance with Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law, which is designed to regulate the processing of personal data,” says CEO Akkar.

Jisr has modernized 70 percent of its workloads and plans to increase it to all workloads in the coming months. As a result of modernization, Jisr can maintain an annual growth rate of more than 100 percent while maintaining its price competitiveness. “Since we moved to microservices, we’ve seen transaction volumes double without any cost increases, ensuring customers continue to receive unbeatable value,” says CEO Akkar.

The AWS infrastructure behind Jisr HR is more scalable, seamlessly expanding as traffic increases and the business grows. “It’s been noticeable that we’ve been able to expand rapidly and still maintain resilience, ensuring maximum uptime for customers,” comments CEO Akkar.

In addition to Jisr gaining more time for innovation and development, the agility of a modernized SaaS architecture makes software deployment simpler. For a SaaS platform that must fully adhere to Saudi Arabia’s Personal Data Protection Law, “Data regulations are changing worldwide, including in Saudi Arabia. The agility of our AWS platform makes it easy to maintain full compliance, so our customers have less to think about,” says CEO Akkar.

Looking ahead, Jisr plans to stay on its modernization path with AWS. This includes adopting serverless compute service, AWS Fargate for container management, and Amazon Redshift for data warehousing. CEO Akkar concludes, “We never stop looking at new AWS services to increase the value of Jisr HR to organizations across Saudi Arabia.”