Khatib & Alami relies on iland

Khatib & Alami (K&A) is leveraging iland’s enterprise cloud and disaster recovery services as the IT backbone that runs and protects its mission critical applications. The top 100 international design firm first turned to iland to help deliver business continuity across its private cloud and then again as the company faced rapid growth that required 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.

After several years, the company’s growth began to outpace the efficiency and scalability capabilities of its private cloud. K&A’s IT team found themselves spending exorbitant budgetary and personnel resources purchasing, deploying and maintaining hardware to support its infrastructure.

“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.”

“It was our working relationship that tipped the balance in iland’s favor, as well as the tremendous support and rapport we have with iland’s engineering and customer service teams,” said Saad. “They understand our business.”

K&A also selected iland because of its Enterprise Cloud Services portal, the cloud management tool that gives K&A’s team real?time visibility and transparency into their cloud, even enabling them to manage disaster recovery from the same interface.

“We use the iland ECS portal to manage our cloud resources. It is a very convenient and powerful tool that has enabled us to keep pace with our growing organisation,” said Saad.