During his participation at the Gateway Gulf forum, which is being held under the patronage of HRH Prince Salman bin Hamad AlKhalifa, the Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and Chairman of the Bahrain Economic Development Board, the Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) Chief Executive, Mr. Mohamed Ali AlQaed confirmed the iGA has succeeded in fully migrating more than 40 government systems and services to the Cloud utilizing more than 480 AWS servers.
Work is underway to complete migration in order to achieve the desired results by enhancing work efficiency in governmental and semi-governmental entities to provide better quality services along with store and protect information due to their prominent role in reducing operational costs of IT sector systems and promoting driving activities of the economy and investment.
The Chief Executive highlighted that ICT has been used to support and accelerate the implementation of all national projects and initiatives in various services, including healthcare and the judiciary.
“Government work have witnessed vast enhancements in its early stages of the migration process towards the cloud. This strategic direction has contributed in reducing ICT infrastructure operational expenditures by approximately 60%-90% and enabled the concerned officials in IT to activate operations of monitoring performance and protect information security of government systems,” explained the Chief Executive.
“We are proud that the Kingdom is the first Arab country which adopts the cloud computing policy following its approval by the Supreme Committee for Information & Communication Technology (SCICT) chaired by H.H. Shaikh Mohammed bin Mubarak AlKhalifa, Deputy Prime Minister. This confirms that Bahrain’s government direction is moving towards the right path in the eTransformation field as it maintained, throughout the years, the international lead in several reports including the UN eGovernment survey along with the International Telecommunication Union,” further elaborated AlQaed. “Such policy relies on applying the principal of redirecting investment in the IT towards cloud computing – in collaboration with Amazing Web Services. The policy did not overlook the security aspect to operate the informatics systems as well as setting all necessary criteria to ensure a safe migration to the cloud. Through adjusting government system legislations, the Authority has succeeded in opening new horizons to invest in the IT field – positively reflecting the local and regional IT markets,” he added.
The Chief Executive also addressed the importance of establishing national capacities and competencies working in concerned entities through workshops as well as training and professional courses to support government migration to the cloud. In this regard, the CE commented that, until today, more than 400 employees from government and semi-government entities have undergone training in specialized courses to attain the AWS Certificate in line with the MOU signed between iGA and Tamkeen to support employees in the technology field to attain specialized certificates. An additional 700 individuals are scheduled to be trained by the third quarter of 2018.