CASE STUDY Qatar First Investment Bank
SETTING STANDARDS Qatar First Investment Bank chooses the cloud to host its disaster recovery apps and data, and finds that it could not have chosen better. By Sathya Mithra Ashok | Photography Cris Mejorada
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atar First Investment Bank (QFIB) is a young company. And like any other young company in the bustling, economically booming country of Qatar, its ambitions reach far and long. “We were formed in 2009. But the planning for our organisation started much before that. We have all the advantages that come with a new, young company, and we have set our sights on growth and achievement as our development path for the years to come,” says Slim Bouker, COO of QFIB. The team at QFIB realised even when they were setting up, that information technology would have to be a basic pillar that supports them not just in their immediate activities but in their future growth as well. “We started planning in 2008. We had the business plan in place and we knew strategically what we wanted to be in five years’ time. We built the IT base on that strategy to get us to where we wanted to be in five years,” says Mahmood Shaker, CIO at QFIB. “We wanted our infrastructure to be scalable – something that would stretch from three to ten years. We did not want to be repeatedly spending money on this and so we built our data centre with those requirements. We also chose technology solutions that would last us for five years. Keeping this in mind, we partnered with Microsoft for a range of solutions. We also chose Temenos as our core banking solution as we found it to have all the
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Computer News Middle East
JUNE 2011
functionality that we needed. The beauty of this infrastructure is that we built all of this almost by ourselves,” says Shaker with pride. QFIB operates on a core infrastructure www.computernewsme.com
model that utilises active directory with Exchange and SQL for databases alongside Exchange with messaging. QFIB also hosts its core banking service and utilises system