Kuwait Finance House - Bahrain's (KFH-Bahrain) data centre has been awarded the information security certification ISO 27001, following a stringent audit by an international certification body.

It is the first Islamic bank in the kingdom to achieve this milestone. The certificate was presented to KFH-Bahrain chief executive Abdulhakeem Alkhayyat.

"We are delighted with this accreditation as it demonstrates KFH-Bahrain's leadership in the information technology arena of Islamic banking and financial sector in Bahrain," said Alkhayyat.

"With this certification, the bank will be able to launch innovative electronic services for its retail and corporate customers. With the growing need for information security and IT risk in the area of information technology, the importance of this achievement cannot be overstated.

"We have always been aware that the centre, network infrastructure and associated services play a vital role in running banking services," he remarked.

"We, therefore, decided to adopt global best practices and implement ISO controls in our main data centre and network to mitigate the risk of intrusions and disruptions," he added.

The centre infrastructure is based on an integrated rack, power and cooling solution, complete with advanced management and monitoring hardware and software. It improved the overall reliability and accessibility with complete network redundancy, EMC data storage within a VMware virtualisation environment.

This state-of-the-art infrastructure will sustain KFH-Bahrain's technical requirements for the next 10 years with an integrated ability for future growth and IT transformation.-TradeArabia News Service