Mumtalakat Launches Educational Workshops for the Group

Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company (Mumtalakat), the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Bahrain, hosted a Lunch & Learn workshop on 26th February 2018 titled “Cybersecurity & Cloud Computing” for its local companies within the Group at the Capital Club Bahrain.

The workshop is part of a series of educational seminars that will be conducted throughout the year and aims to bring together business partners to share expertise and knowledge amongst the Group. Mumtalakat hosted this first workshop for the IT professionals in its portfolio companies with speakers from the Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Batelco and Tamkeen (Bahrain’s labour fund).

Welcoming Group employees at the workshop, Mahmood H. Alkooheji, CEO of Mumtalakat, commented, “It is very important for us to enhance cyber-security and cloud computing solutions across the Group; forums like these enable knowledge exchange and awareness of best practices adopted.

“We are proud that AWS has selected Bahrain as the location for its first ever data centre in the Middle East. The Government of Bahrain, along with Mumtalakat, Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) and the Economic Development Board (EDB) are already using cloud technologies through AWS-in fact, we started our journey in November last year- and I encourage our portfolio companies to partner with them as well,” he added.

Attended by information technology professionals from over 15 local companies within the Mumtalakat Group as well as representatives from AWS, iGA, Batelco and Tamkeen and AWS service providers, the workshop focused on the government Cloud First initiative with which Mumtalakat is aligned, and the benefits of adopting AWS cloud-based solutions to locally-hosted platforms. The sessions were presented by Shaikh Salman bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, Acting Vice Chief Executive, iGA, Abdulla Shijaz, Solutions Architect Lead, AWS, and Gajendra Rao, Customer Solutions Consultant, Batelco.

Global spending on cloud services is predicted to reach US $15 billion in 2018. This will have an impact on cost savings amongst cloud adopters, companies are predicted to save up to 40%. Currently, AWS is leading public cloud adaptation and considered as the fastest technology vendor in history – more than 60% of cloud computing users are adopting it.

In addition, Mumtalakat has collaborated with Tamkeen on this initiative to ensure that companies within the Group can obtain tailored AWS training programmes in the coming year.