The Securities and Investment Company, based in the Middle East, was originally built on a traditional on-premises banking system. But that infrastructure eventually impeded the bank’s agility and competitive edge in its marketplace. To become more competitive, the company migrated to a modern, scalable architecture, ultimately transitioning to hyperconverged infrastructure.

“The challenge was to move SICO from the traditional [infrastructure] … allowing [us] to grow … add more applications … really develop and focus more on the functionalities other than infrastructure,” said Mohammed Ibrahim (@garbar77, pictured), head of information technologies at SICO.

Ibhrahim spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Nice, France. They discussed the motivations behind the bank’s transition to HCI. (* Disclosure below.)

HCI-enabled agility

In order to ensure compliance in the global markets where the bank operates, the SICO information technology team opted to build a private cloud. The hardware infrastructure for this private cloud consists of two separate data centers, a primary one and one for disaster recovery, according to Ibrahim.

“If you tell [our clients], ‘I’m going for a public cloud,’ they will tell you, ‘It’s against confidentiality.’ You cannot take the customer information and put it somewhere. So we said, ‘OK, we will go [with] private cloud,” Ibrahim explained.

The selection criteria for managing the private cloud servers and virtual instances revolved around ease of scalability. The simplicity of spinning up HCI with the click of a button ultimately drew Ibrahim and his team to and HCI solution from Nutanix Inc.

“With Nutanix or hyperconverged infrastructure …  you can add resources and you can keep your application running as-is. You can keep your data as-is without interrupting the business,” Ibrahim concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Nutanix .NEXT EU. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Nutanix .NEXT EU event. Neither Nutanix Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE