Khatib & Alami reduces costs by 40 percent on migration from private to public cloud

The top 100 international design firm Khatib & Alami (K&A), Based in Lebanon, manages and protects its clients’ multi-billion revenue projects with the global cloud solutions specialist iland’s enterprise cloud and disaster recovery services. It is now leveraging enterprise cloud and disaster recovery services as the IT backbone that runs and protects its mission critical applications as the company faces rapid growth requiring the scalability and efficiency of public cloud.

Originally established in 1964 as an architecture consultancy, K&A has grown to attain international status with operations in the Middle East, Africa, Western Europe and North America. No stranger to innovative technology, the company is recognised as a leading consultant in a number of disciplines, including architecture and engineering services; urban and regional planning; power and electrical utilities; telecommunication and many others.

K&A manages complex, high-value projects with aggressive deadlines, making it vital for the company to guarantee the availability of its mission critical systems and meet performance targets. The IT team initially made the move to a private cloud hosted in an iland data centre as part of its strategy to consolidate the IT environments that supported its numerous global offices. During that transition, the company also experimented with public cloud by implementing iland’s Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service to support business continuity should anything happen to its private cloud. 

“We requested proposals from multiple providers, but the solution that iland presented seemed more logical for our business and a much better fit for us than the others,” said Mohamed Saad, corporate IT manager at Khatib & Alami. “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,” said Saad. “What’s more, the public cloud was considerably more economical than using our own equipment. We’re getting close to 35‐40 percent cost savings.”

“As with any technology adoption, transitioning between IT infrastructures can be daunting, particularly because many providers leave customers to navigate disparate management and disaster recovery add-ons by themselves,” said Lilac Schoenbeck, VP of product management and marketing at iland. “We’re committed to teaming with our customers, like K&A, to simplify migration and ensure they have the right mix of baseline infrastructure, tools and support they need to best address their business initiatives and protect business continuity.”