Khatib & Alami moved onto iland’s public cloud platform this year

Global architectural design and project management firm Khatib & Alami (K&A) has moved from a private cloud platform onto a public cloud, which the company said has led to a 40 per cent reduction in IT operations management spend.

K&A, which was set up in 1964 and has offices in the Middle East, Africa, Western Europe and North America, offers a range of architectural and engineering services.

The company originally moved to deploy its internal applications on a private cloud platform hosted in iland’s datacentre in London, which it did in order to consolidate its IT environments.

At the time the company also experimented with public cloud platforms, but preferred to maintain its private cloud deployment. However, while it’s difficult to narrow down an exact figure where private and public cloud platforms are equal in cost, the company’s corporate IT manager Mohamed Saad said the public cloud option began to make more sense at the company’s growth began to outpace its ability to scale efficiently, both in terms to technology and personnel.

“The hardware was becoming too restrictive because we weren’t able to scale up.  We would have had to purchase more hardware and then deploy that and add more virtual servers with capacity for additional processing power. We would also have needed to employ the maintenance staff that went along with purchasing more hardware. Then we’d have to maintain all this equipment,” he explained.

“All of the maintenance and management headaches and the fact we needed rapid scalability helped us come to the decision that having our own private cloud infrastructure was just too much of a hassle.”

“What’s more, iland’s public cloud was considerably more economical than using our own equipment. We’re getting close to 35 to 40 per cent cost savings with iland’s cloud. iland now hosts all of our mission critical applications, allowing us to focus our IT efforts on activities that drive our business forward,” he added.