SICO

SICO BSC (C)

is a leading regional asset manager, broker, and investment bank with more than USD 4.5 bn in assets under management (AUM). headquartered in the Kingdom of Bahrain with a growing regional and international presence, SICO has a well-established track record as a trusted regional bank offering a comprehensive suite of financial solutions including asset management, brokerage, investment banking, and market making backed by a robust and experienced research team that provides regional insight and analysis of more than 90 percent of the GCC’s major equities. Since inception in 1995 SICO has consistently outperformed the market and developed a solid base of institutional and retail clients.

Requirment

Moving to public cloud is one of the main initiatives taken by SICO to implement the digital transformation strategy for entire business. According to that SICO has decided to implement fully integrated system for Custody, Fund Administration & Registrar services on the cloud to provide SICO’s customers the best services & performance using the latest technologies and infrastructure.

WHY AMAZON WEB SERVICES?

SICO evaluated several cloud platforms before ultimately selecting AWS. The deciding factors were the reliability, extensive ecosystem of partners and services, and availability of AWS datacentres inside Bahrain with a competitive pricing comparing to others, as well as AWS customer service.

  • Leading public cloud provider
  • Datacenters with high availability zones inside Bahrain
  • Pay as you go approach
  • Optimized Performance & stability
  • Fast Deployment

SOLUTION:

SICO selected Almoayyed computers to support and host the system workload on AWS Cloud considering right sizing of Amazon RDS services for Oracle Database to deliver better performance, Security measures, and Compliance. SICO decision to use AWS was mainly the flexibility, reliability, and elasticity. Over the past few years, other services launched by AWS like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Route 53 gave more options to enhance the environment.”

THE BENEFITS OF AWS

  • Decreased the implementation time by eliminating the need to purchase and install servers & storage. Allowing team to focus on delivering and adding value to the business. Providing a very simple solution on deploying I/O heavy workloads and dynamically scales the applications and database as needed.
  • Moreover, “Using AWS, scaling up instance sizes to add compute power for overnight batch processing,” has become very easy and the ability to dynamically scale resources in AWS gives much more flexibility.
  • Easy implementation and directing Oracle Application Schema backups, Snapshot backups to Amazon S3 with very minimal configuration and reduced effort to the DBAs for starting back up their databases to Amazon S3.
  • Optimized uptime with a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.99% using Amazon RDS (Multi-AZ)
  • Allows team to focus on delivering value to the business.
  • Ability to provision multiple instances on the go for application upgrade testing.
  • Ability to resize storage on the go.
  • Base AMI creation for each OS for compatibility testing.
  • Ability to provision multiple databases with different versions to test compatibility.
  • User accessibility, i.e., all the users can access the application even from outside the premises without the need of setting up physical network to support the application.
  • Furthermore, provides other benefits such as Security, Flexibility, Scalability, Durability, Performance and Lower costs.

Client: