A Gulf Bank Moves to a Fully On-Premise Kualitee Deployment

The client is a bank operating in the Gulf region, where financial institutions are held to strict security and data protection standards.

As with most banks in this market, the client’s IT and compliance teams operate under a mandate that any core software infrastructure, including tools used for internal test management, must meet a specific set of regulatory and security requirements before it can be adopted.

Before approaching Kualitee, the client had no dedicated test management platform in place that could satisfy their security posture. Given the nature of their business, a standard cloud-hosted SaaS solution was not an option.

Banks in the Gulf region typically operate under regulatory frameworks that require sensitive data, including test data tied to core banking systems, to remain within infrastructure the institution directly controls. This ruled out any vendor whose only offering was a shared, cloud-hosted product.

The client’s requirements were shaped almost entirely by their regulatory environment rather than by feature gaps in any specific competing tool. Their problem statement centered on two connected needs:

For a bank, these aren’t preferences but hard requirements.

Any vendor unable to deploy on-premise, or unable to demonstrate alignment with these compliance frameworks, would have been disqualified from consideration regardless of feature set.

Kualitee was brought in specifically because it could offer a genuine on-premise deployment model rather than a cloud-only product with limited configuration options. This made it one of the few test management platforms able to meet the client’s non-negotiable security and compliance requirements from the outset.

Kualitee’s team worked directly with the client to stand up a fully on-premise instance of the platform, built around their compliance obligations:

On-premise infrastructure setup. Kualitee’s team deployed the platform’s servers locally within the client’s own environment, rather than relying on any external hosting. This gave the client full control over where their testing data lived and how it was secured, satisfying the core requirement that drove them to seek an on-premise solution in the first place.

Compliance-aligned deployment. The infrastructure was set up in a way that supported the client’s obligations under PCI-DSS, GDPR, and the SAMA Cybersecurity Framework, along with the other regional regulatory requirements the client operates under as a Gulf-based bank.

Free data migration. As with other clients transitioning to Kualitee, the client’s existing test data was migrated onto the new on-premise instance at no additional cost, minimizing the burden of the switch on their internal teams.

Unlike cloud-hosted clients, who receive new features automatically as Kualitee rolls them out, on-premise clients such as this one operate under a different update model by necessity. Kualitee cannot push updates directly into infrastructure it does not host. Instead:

No update or new feature is deployed to the client’s on-premise environment without their explicit consent, given the sensitivity of the systems involved.

This model gives the client full control over when and how their environment changes, which matters considerably for an institution operating under strict change management and compliance obligations.

With Kualitee deployed on-premise, the client now has a test management platform that operates entirely within infrastructure they control, without compromising on functionality relative to Kualitee’s cloud offering.

The relationship with this client continues on Kualitee’s manual update cycle, with new features deployed into their on-premise environment as they request them.

This ongoing, opt-in approach reflects the level of control a banking client in a highly regulated market needs to maintain over their own core systems.