areeba taps Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to support expansion in digital payments

The company offers payment card management and digital payment solutions for banks, merchants, public sector organizations, and individuals. A principal member of the Mastercard and Visa networks and a key partner to American Express and Discover-Diners, areeba continuously invests in technology to achieve seamless payment card transactions and simplify the back-end management of ecommerce, helping all stakeholders move toward a digital world.

To support its expansion  in the Middle East and provide services to its clients, areeba decided to shift core applications, development environments, and business continuity systems from on-premises to the cloud.

Driven by business opportunities in the Middle East, areeba decided to adopt Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and take advantage of the Oracle Cloud regions in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which allow the company to run applications directly in key target markets.

In addition, after conducting a comparative evaluation of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure versus AWS and Azure, areeba found that OCI was ranked 7X less expensive.

The company also chose OCI for development and testing because of the flexibility that the cloud infrastructure offers, and the ability to use cloud native capabilities such as containers and Kubernetes.

After implementing OCI, areeba gained an adequate infrastructure for hosting development environments, third-party databases, and the components of its contactless card management technologies.

Also, it opened a disaster recovery site in the Oracle Cloud region in Jeddah. Saudi Arabian regulations require data to remain in the country, which, before the OCI Saudi Arabia cloud region, had precluded areeba from serving UAE and Saudi customers from its Lebanon data centers.

The company now deploys in-house developed applications on OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE). “We need to have an open architecture that is hardware-agnostic and can be deployed anywhere. And we need to host it in an environment where it’s easy to scale. OCI gives us that with its API-driven Kubernetes building block,” says Infrastructure Manager Georges Abou Zeidan.

Its continuous integration and delivery platforms, along with deployment environments, development tools, and user acceptance testing are all on OCI. All new applications and features are built, tested, and deployed from the OCI development environment using Jenkins and Nexus pipelines.

OCI virtual machines now host the company’s digital payment and processing databases, as well as its archives and a PostgreSQL cluster holding multiple instances of data for different projects. “The speed with which OCI moves these terabyte databases is amazing,” says Zeidan.

To complement Oracle Cloud security, areeba has implemented FortiGate as a second-layer web application firewall (WAF). The high-availability WAF routes traffic from merchants, points-of-sale devices, or any other areeba interface to the Tyk API Gateway implemented in OCI, which forwards all transactions to the Oracle Kubernetes cluster to serve customers.

The company decided to apply cloud-based disaster recovery to strengthen its disaster recovery plan and to provide ultimate business continuity to protect clients’ card operations from downtime or extended outage.

“Our priority is to keep all our clients locally and abroad running and operational by reducing downtime to a minimum. The cloud-based disaster recovery will help us get our systems back online much quicker during an IT disaster and minimize the manual processes of traditional recovery methods,” says Zeidan.

In hybrid mode, areeba continues to operate the on-premises Lebanon production and disaster recovery sites using Oracle Exadata, Oracle Real Application Clusters, and Oracle Data Guard, while running critical production workloads  and development and testing environments on OCI.

Current plans are to roll out a tap-to-pay app as well as new automatic teller machine services, contactless near-field communication solutions, a customer acquisition tool, and other projects on areeba’s innovative roadmap.

The company is waiting for countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council region, including Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan, to issue cloud regulations that will allow it to provide services from the Dubai Oracle Cloud region. Looking to the future, areeba plans to use OCI to launch its own card management application programming interface, which will allow Middle Eastern fintech companies to onboard themselves to the platform, acquire merchants, and offer payment card solutions to their customers.

Within six weeks, areeba went live with its OCI deployment. Oracle Cloud Lift Services provided 70 days of support for the migration and for designing the new hybrid architecture. The team used the RackWare platform for moving applications from an on-premises data center to Oracle’s Jeddah disaster recovery site.