GGCI ramps up security and compliance capabilities with Nutanix

Saudi insurance company with massive growth ambitions deploys Nutanix Flow, to address regulatory gaps and introduce new operational efficiencies

Nutanix a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced that Saudi Arabia’s Gulf General Cooperative Insurance Company (GGCI) has successfully completed its journey to the powerful Nutanix Cloud in a move designed to help the organization overcome regulatory compliance and security challenges.

“Currently, the retail segment of the Saudi insurance industry is booming,” said Shaikh Hassan, Head of IT, Gulf General Cooperative Insurance. “GGCI is a SAR200-million company and we have plans in place to expand to SAR400 million in the near future.”

The company’s vision is to provide a versatile product range to the Saudi Arabian market. Its ambition to become the premier insurance-services provider in the kingdom required its stakeholders to evaluate internal IT architecture with a view to compliance and security.

“The regulator in Saudi Arabia is very strict and they impose a range of restrictions to ensure robust cybersecurity,” said Shaikh Hassan. “That includes stringent requirements on the level and frequency of reporting of certain network events to the regulator.”

GGCI’s legacy infrastructure – consisting of an eclectic mix of servers, storage and backup solutions – stood in the way of its growth plans because it did not smoothly accommodate the integration of applications that were mandated by Saudi Arabia’s regulators.

“Nutanix is not only hardware, its a software solution as well,” Shaikh Hassan said. “The implementation has really made our lives easier. We can provide an efficient solution with a great experience to our customers, while at the same time responding to the regulators more quickly.”

GGCI now runs its core applications, its HR and IT systems, and its customer service call centers on the Nutanix platform, deploying Nutanix Flow and is currently testing Xi Leap and Xi Beam.

Nutanix Flow delivers a rich view of communications between virtual machines, allowing the setting of appropriate policies for environments. It delivers advanced networking and security services, providing visibility into the virtual network, application-centric protection from network threats, malware, and ransomware and automation of common networking operations.

Nutanix Xi Leap is a cloud-based disaster recovery solution built for the proprietary Nutanix Acropolis operating system (AOS). Xi Leap delivers failover, failback and test recovery plans for Nutanix AOS clusters and comes with its own secure VPN. IT admin teams are freed from the laborious complexity of managing a data center, leveraging instead the flexibility of DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

Working with AWS, Azure, and Nutanix private clouds, Xi Beam helps allow organizations to minimize cloud costs and security risks and take granular control of their public and private clouds. The vulnerabilities and cost leaks normally associated with multi-cloud ecosystems are eliminated and teams can identify and address security issues in real time.

According to Shaikh Hassan, under the company’s legacy ecosystem, his team would spend most of its time managing the diverse infrastructure, but after the rollout of Nutanix, the same team members have been freed up to apply their talents to more innovative areas, such as strategy and systems enhancement.

“Our CEO is a visionary person,” Shaikh Hassan explained, “and he needs projects to be completed in just a few months, or sometimes even a few days. Now that we have these Nutanix boxes in place, we can utilize our time more on those projects.”

“Digital transformation is so important to the regional insurance sector and for such companies, growth can be stymied by an inability to be flexible enough to please regulators,” said Aaron White, Regional Sales Director, Middle East at Nutanix. “GGCI chose Nutanix products because of their ability to inject agility into an organization through the well-managed infrastructure that comes with cloud-based compliance and disaster recovery. Simplifying your data center is the first step to becoming a secure, compliant and efficient enterprise capable of delivering excellent experiences to customers, and of drawing glowing assessments from industry watchdogs and regulators.”