Shedding light on the Kingdom of Bahrain’s National Broadband Network “BNET”’s successful cloud adoption, a case study was recently published by Amazon Web Services (AWS)  that follows BNET’s journey as it prepared to separate its digital and data infrastructure from its parent company Batelco by migrating business-critical and historical data into new applications within a new information technology environment. 

In 2019 and shortly after its launch, BNET selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud service provider to leverage cloud technology because of the speed, time-to-market, cost optimization, flexibility, scalability, and agility benefits. This partnership resulted in meeting the main IT infrastructure requirements for BNET’s separation from Batelco within a year.

BNET also had to meet compliance standards with security and data privacy regulations mandated by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) of the Kingdom of Bahrain. “We had milestones to reach, including individual deadlines for access control separation, platform separation, and physical separation from Batelco,” said BNET Chief Executive Officer Mohamed Bubashait. “To meet these requirements, we knew we needed more agility and scalability than we could get from an on-premises solution. We had to move to the cloud.”

The case study follows BNET’s journey as it worked with its strategic partners Ebit and BearingPoint to migrate to the cloud. BNET was able to separate from Batelco and launch its BSS and OSS in eight months because of the agility and flexibility of AWS. The company saved time by automating the creation of an environment for running secure and scalable workloads while implementing an initial security baseline by constructing core accounts and resources.

BNET was able to reduce the total cost of ownership by running its business on AWS. Salah Abdulrahim, Chief Technical Officer at BNET, said that “had we used an on-premises approach to launch our business, we would have spent a lot of money buying an environment and all the hardware. There would be a huge upfront cost. With AWS, there is almost zero capital investment, and we only pay for the capacity and storage we use, so we can reduce our IT costs.”

AWS’s flexible and reliable services enable BNET to increase the capacity of the services it delivers to over one million customers, and support its efforts to ensure users across the Kingdom have consistent and dependable access to its services. 

BNET’s launch back in 2019 played a crucial part in the implementation of the fourth National Telecommunication Plan (NTP4), especially in relation to fostering digital growth through enabling the development of innovative digital services in Bahrain. BNET’s vision centres on creating a technologically advanced digital communication infrastructure that enables a safe, secure, and smart Kingdom, contributing to Bahrain’s economic growth and consumer welfare. A core part of BNET’s strategy is to continuously introduce and utilize innovative technologies in its daily operations to ensure high efficiency and effectiveness. This made building its IT systems on the cloud an obvious choice for BNET.