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NTERNATIONAL Data Corporation (IDC) has recognized Alinma Bank for its outstanding IT transformation efforts, by presenting the bank with its “Best Information Transformation” award at the IDC CIO 2018 Awards, which took place recently in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This year’s award was given in recognition of Alinma’s migration from the industry standard datacenter model, to the more advanced “Active-Active” model.

Speaking about the award Alinma Bank CEO, Abdulmohsen Al-Fares, said he was pleased to have reached this important milestone.

“The Active-Active model is the gold standard for data center operation, and it is something that we targeted from day one,” said Al-Fares. “With its implementation, Alinma has achieved a major objective in its ongoing IT strategic development, and we anticipate that this move will make Alinma even more capable of delivering best-in-class e-services to our partners as we continue to grow and scale our businesses.”

The Active-Active data center model is a major improvement over the Active-Passive model still in use by many banks. With Active-Passive, banks can only duplicate data at periodic intervals from primary to secondary data centers as part of typical disaster recovery operations. During system failures, this leads to cancelled customer transactions and often significant downtime for e-services.

With the Active-Active model, Alinma has eliminated transactional and operational delays and downtime through the 100%, real-time integration of both its primary and secondary data centers. This allows Alinma to provide its partners (customers) with a more seamless, secure e-service experience, in which system failures no longer impact the completion of transactions or other banking operations. — SG