With VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, iGA Bahrain has achieved a cloud-like experience on-premises, providing its government and public sector customers with a secure sovereign cloud experience, while less sensitive data can be hosted on VMware Cloud in the AWS Bahrain region.
Information and eGovernment Authority, Bahrain, iGA is on a mission to enable a new era of smart government in the Kingdom. iGA is the umbrella for all Bahrain public sector entities, providing digital services to the government, including hosting, operating, and managing the government’s systems.
The services that iGA provides are effectively the digital backbone for the country, covering all government departments and public sector entities, including large-scale infrastructure such as Bahrain International Airport, King Fahad Causeway, and seaports, in addition to healthcare, education and all types of services for businesses, citizens, residents and visitors.
Legacy pain points
iGA faced numerous challenges as it devised its strategy to work toward the government’s targets. While the organisation had about 75% of its workloads in the public cloud since around 2017, the remaining 25% of sensitive and critical workloads were held on-premises with a separate on-premises facility for disaster recovery.
There was little coordination between the cloud and on-premises workloads, which led to increased complexity, especially when workloads needed to be moved between the two. This setup also required significant resources to manage and maintain and iGA needed more agility to upscale capacity or offer new services and solutions to government departments.
Furthermore, if iGA wanted to achieve its aims by doubling down on the same approach and expanding its on-premises infrastructure, it would mean expanding the team to manage and maintain it, countering the government’s aim to control costs while increasing efficiency.
Dr Khalid Ahmed Almutawah, Deputy Chief Executive, Operations and Governance, iGA, says, “Running a traditional data centre was labour intensive and made it tough to optimise our operations. One of the pain points was that we spent significant resources just to maintain the health of the infrastructure rather than proactively helping our customers to innovate. The lack of coordination with our public cloud resource was also stifling our ability to serve our customers and offer the kind of flexibility that they needed.”
The disaster recovery setup also presented a risk: iGA was using a manual solution that required a minimum of six hours to start up, which in the event of a disaster could lead to loss of data and services to end users. In a worst-case scenario, this could have caused IT outages in mission-critical environments such as hospitals, transport infrastructure and border control.
Hybrid cloud with DR
The pandemic was just one example of a crisis that pressured government departments and services, especially healthcare, and put the need for agile ICT systems into stark focus. The team at iGA realised that situations change suddenly and that IT must be able to respond seamlessly to maintain operations.
iGA was already familiar with VMware, having used its technology to run some components of its existing cloud deployment, which led the organisation to explore embracing a more holistic hybrid cloud approach with VMware. iGA opted to deploy a full hybrid cloud solution with VMware, including moving its remaining on-premises workloads and recovery site to a sovereign cloud solution, fully integrated with its public cloud workloads.
As the main provider of digital services to government agencies, iGA needed to have the most secure, flexible, efficient, and agile solutions available, and the ability to offer secure sovereign cloud services, disaster recovery, and DR as a service. It was vital for iGA to have flexible cloud infrastructure and cloud management capabilities in place to offer secure cloud services, including sovereign cloud and disaster recovery, to end users.
To achieve this, iGA deployed a hybrid cloud platform consisting of integrated VMware solutions, including VMware Aria Universal Suite. iGA opted to deploy VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts to give a completely managed sovereign cloud solution for its on-premises workloads. It deployed VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Site Recovery to ensure maximum availability and business continuity for its users.
Successful orchestration
With VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, iGA has achieved a cloud-like experience on-premises, providing its customers with a secure sovereign cloud experience. Meanwhile, less sensitive data can be stored and managed on VMware Cloud on AWS Bahrain region. iGA uses VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery to protect its data and applications in the most efficient way possible.
The solution is available as a SaaS solution, which means it helps iGA to efficiently secure its data and services. This is especially useful for supporting government agency users whose requirements can change suddenly. To ensure a rapid return of its sites to normal operations in a disaster recovery scenario, iGA Bahrain also deployed VMware Site Recovery, allowing for the rapid replication and restoration of the on-premises component of iGA cloud infrastructure.
With VMware Aria Universal Suite, a SaaS management suite, iGA has achieved consistent operations and optimisation across its infrastructure and applications, from its on-premises data centre to the edge and across clouds. This has enabled iGA to provide its customers the flexibility to deploy on-premises or SaaS interchangeably for a consistent hybrid and multi-cloud management experience.
Customer benefits
By providing a cloud experience across all workloads through its combination of on-premises and public cloud, iGA enables its government agency customers to innovate and improve reliability. This also offers government agencies significant cost savings on IT by using only the capacity they need and reducing the need for day-to-day maintenance. These solutions, including VMware Aria Universal Suite, will allow iGA to focus on higher value-added activities while aligning with the government’s cloud-first strategy.
Deploying VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Site Recovery has given iGA and the agencies it serves peace of mind that all the services are highly available. Even in a disaster, such as damage to the on-premises data centre, workloads could be reallocated to maintain the end-user experience with almost no discernible impact.
Boosting digital transformation
With its hybrid cloud infrastructure and systems in place, iGA is also keen to help government agencies use the new platform to maximum effect by developing, managing, and maintaining modern applications from the cloud. To help government agencies drive further app modernisation, iGA is exploring the idea of deploying VMware Tanzu solutions.
“We want to encourage them to develop applications with tools such as Kubernetes and containerisation, which will help them to improve and optimise their applications while boosting efficiency. This, in many ways, represents an evolution of what we have already achieved,” says Almutawah.
“The team at iGA is excited to build on the momentum we have already achieved and continue to help the Government of Bahrain achieve the aims of its eGovernment strategy to deliver outstanding digital services and drive economic diversity and prosperity,” reflects Almutawah.
VMware footprint at iGA Bahrain
- VMware Aria Universal Suite
- VMware Cloud on AWS
- VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts
- VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery
- VMware Site Recovery
iGA has deployed a hybrid cloud platform consisting of integrated VMware solutions, including VMware Aria Universal Suite. iGA opted to deploy VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts to give a managed sovereign cloud solution for its on-premises workloads. It deployed VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Site Recovery to ensure maximum availability and business continuity for its users. To help government agencies drive further application modernisation, iGA is exploring the idea of deploying VMware Tanzu solutions.
