Bahrain’s Information and eGovernment authority moves over 20,000 employees to cloud with Microsoft solutions

The iGA is an integral part of the Government services system provided to citizens, residents, visitors, businesses, and governmental entities. Its goal is to create a robust, flexible, and safe environment that will encourage innovation in public services. The idea of a Cloud First policy first appeared in 2017. 

"We explored the benefits of the cloud to accelerate our digital transformation and innovation while reducing operational costs," says Dr. Khalid Ahmed Al Mutawah, Deputy CE of Operation & Governance at iGA. 

The institution has a 23-year relationship with Microsoft. "After exploring different platforms and making comparisons, we decided that moving to the cloud with Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 will increase our productivity, build efficient collaborations, and enhance professional communications with internal and external stakeholders," Dr. Khalid adds.

Ready to work and study from home

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the iGA’s team, along employees from more than 70 other Government organizations, were ready to work from home and were already using cloud solutions. 

"With our Cloud First policy, there are no limitations," says Hesham Ebrahim Al-Hashemi, Director of Government Systems Support & Maintenance at iGA. “Using Microsoft 365, we can hold meetings, and share and work on the same documents at the same time from different places. As a result, Bahrain was up and running 24/7 during the pandemic.” 

Remote work brought other benefits as well. "Each of us spent about five hours weekly getting to meetings. Extrapolate that to all 20,000 employees that now work online, and you have 100,000 working hours saved per week only in this regard," says Dr. Khalid. "More than that, we empower our people to learn how to make the most of the tools by helping them gain new digital skills and even become certified in using Microsoft solutions."

The new tools were also being used in other sectors during the pandemic lockdowns. 

"We had more than 140,000 students sitting at home, not being able to reach schools. So around 250 schools started using Microsoft Teams to manage classes online," adds Ahmed Abdulla Al-Thawadi, Chief of Shared Services Management at iGA.

Gaining a new level of security

Security is another essential aspect of the transition to the cloud.

"Dynamics 365 is used to build secure Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms for a couple of ministries," says Dr. Khalid. "Having a single sign-on into all systems is an effective way to attract employees to join the cloud. We also enabled multi-factor authentication so users can operate from anywhere, at anytime, without any concerns for security," he adds.

The iGA plans to continue adopting advanced technologies in carrying out future national projects and initiatives. 

"Our next steps are to shift everybody to SharePoint Online, and move some workloads running on data centers from on-premise to Azure, to minimize costs. Also, we plan to deploy PowerBI to manage data, and use Power Apps to build a simpler internal workflow between ministries. We can proudly say that the iGA isn’t the only organization that is building a harmonic collaborative environment, but that this extends to the entire country," concludes Al-Hashemi.