Saudi transportation’s flight to the cloud is paying dividends

The International Monetary Fund released its annual World Economic Outlook report earlier this year. It anticipated Saudi Arabia to be one of the fastest-growing economies in 2022, with a gross domestic product growth of 7.6 percent.

Transportation is one of the industry sectors contributing actively toward this growth. Accordingly, the Kingdom has committed to significant investments in the transportation sector’s key areas, such as logistics, railway, aviation, maritime and land transport, to support the economic diversification objectives of the Vision 2030 program.

With recently announced plans to invest $147 billion in transportation and logistics over the next decade, the Kingdom’s vision to position itself as a global transport, logistics and aviation hub is well underway. Similarly, the Saudi Ministry of Finance confirmed a $15 billion investment in infrastructure and transportation projects across the Kingdom last year.

Advances to accelerate innovation in the transportation industry with cloud-powered technologies are leading to exciting new possibilities for economic growth in the Kingdom. With a supportive cloud regulatory environment, like the Cloud-First Policy, the Kingdom’s leading transportation companies are embracing digital technologies to reduce costs and enhance efficiencies.

The benefits of adopting cloud technology in the transportation sector are numerous.

Besides managing transportation throughout its global supply chain to combine ease of use resulting in reduced freight costs and optimized service levels, organizations can run their operations efficiently and forecast more accurately, ensuring the best use of resources.

Saudi Ground Services, the national ground services company in Saudi Arabia, operates in 28 airports across the country and the Saudi Railway Co. lead by example.

Aviation operations on the cloud

SGS has migrated its information technology services locally with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, providing a rapid scale of operations, capitalizing on cost-effectiveness and creating a future-ready technology ecosystem.

By migrating its IT systems from an on-premises environment to a Cloud environment, SGS is driving higher performance, ensuring continuous availability of all systems and access to the latest security systems to support the mission-critical operations of the company.

SGS is the driving force behind the efficient and safe ground handling of over 96 percent of all aircraft and passenger operations across the Kingdom. Creating an agile, secure and cost-effective IT infrastructure is thus key to enabling improved delivery and reliability of its critical aviation services.

Securing rail data infrastructure

SAR implemented a major digital transformation with Oracle Cloud to enhance business agility, create a robust cybersecurity infrastructure, automate the core ticketing system and reduce costs. Its rapidly expanding operations required a comprehensive disaster recovery system that complements a fully automated and paperless ticketing system.

The railway company is now maintaining full compliance, ensuring security and gaining real-time performance data with unique data insights to enable faster and more accurate decision making.

Cloud-enabled technologies are significantly supporting the Kingdom’s economic diversification plans. In addition to helping drive cost efficiencies, improve agility, provide robust cybersecurity and make processes faster, cloud-led digital transformation will accelerate innovation in Saudi enterprises — a key catalyst for economic success.

• Fahad Al-Turief is vice president - cloud, Saudi Arabia, Levant & North Africa Markets, Oracle.