Jeevan ThankappanAl Rajhi Takaful is one of the largest insurance companies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Ranked number one in motor and life insurance, the firm offers a range of products, including general and medical insurance, serving a customer base of approximately 3.5 million in the Kingdom.
As the company scales rapidly, it seeks to provide innovative insurance solutions to its customers. To support its business objectives, Al Rajhi Takaful required a modern, scalable, and secure digital infrastructure.
Recognizing this need, Al Rajhi Takaful selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). With OCI, the company can automate core business processes, scale quickly, ensure compliance with local data residency regulations, and run applications faster and more securely at a lower cost.
“Before moving to Oracle Cloud, we had a legacy data center hosted on-site, which faced numerous challenges, including issues with availability, scalability, and performance,” explains Salem Alqahtani, CTO of Al Rajhi Takaful. “The main driver for migrating to OCI was to adopt a cloud-native environment as part of our strategic direction.” He emphasizes that ensuring business continuity and maintaining credibility with customers by guaranteeing always-on services was critical.
Migration Challenges and Approach
Salem acknowledges that transitioning from a legacy environment to a cloud-native one was challenging. “However, with the support from Oracle and their partners, we managed these challenges effectively. Within a very short time, we completed the migration with no major interruptions to the business,” he says.
The company adopted a hybrid migration approach, given its legacy environment. “Some components were lift-and-shift, others were replaced with new solutions, and some were built from scratch. It was truly a mix of migration types,” Salem adds.
Today, approximately 98% of Al Rajhi Takaful’s workloads are on the cloud. While reduced operational costs are a benefit, Salem highlights performance and scalability as the primary drivers of the migration. “Our vision is to become the top-ranked insurance company in the Kingdom, which means we expect significant business growth. Therefore, we need a scalable, highly available, and high-performance environment to achieve our goals.”
Leveraging Data and AI for Future Growth
Currently, Salem and his team are building a data lake environment to enhance the company’s AI capabilities. “We have a significant program focused on data and AI. We’ve developed our own AI solutions running on OCI, starting with applications like medical claims approval, motor assessment, claims assessment, pricing, and cross-selling,” Salem explains.
Looking ahead, the company plans to explore OCI’s advanced AI and machine learning capabilities further to improve operations.
Why OCI?
Before selecting OCI, Al Rajhi Takaful evaluated other cloud providers, including Google and AWS. “Oracle stood out due to its local data center and disaster recovery (DR) site, which were critical factors for us,” Salem notes. Additionally, the company sought a partner capable of providing effective support, managing the environment, and being readily available.
Future Plans with OCI
In addition to leveraging OCI for its data and AI initiatives, Al Rajhi Takaful plans to expand its data center to include both primary and secondary environments. The company is also close to decommissioning its on-premises data center.
“OCI is also providing the foundation for Al Rajhi Takaful to launch innovative products like digital insurance and personalized solutions. By leveraging AI and advanced analytics on OCI, Al Rajhi Takaful can gain deeper customer insights and deliver customized solutions that will help the company lead the Sharia-compliant insurance sector,” says Fahad Al Turief, vice president – Technology Cloud, Saudi, Levant and North Africa, Oracle.
