UAE’s National Takaful Company (Watania) has chosen BIOS Middle East as its Disaster Recovery Service (DraaS) provider.
The move is part of the organisation’s proactive strategy on the part of the Abu Dhabi-based insurance company to ensure business continuity and embed resilience across its operations.
BIOSME is the first and only company in the Middle East to be recognised by Gartner as a “niche player” for DRaaS.
“As a publicly listed insurance company it is important for us to prevent data loss and avoid disruption to our business,” said Gautam Dutta, CEO of Watania.
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Watania depends on reliable infrastructure and full-time application availability at all times, so any downtime and data loss could disrupt business continuity. When BIOSME came on board, the team identified over 30 workloads as critical to the business. These included core insurance applications, Financial System and Digital Platform to name few.
BIOSME specialises in taking a bespoke, solutions-driven approach that focuses on each client’s unique business requirements. As such, multiple tools were used to replicate critical databases and virtual machines to CloudHPT, the GCC’s local cloud, in Dubai.
BIOSME delivered a blended service-level agreement (SLA) with a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 10 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than one hour.
A significant requirement for Watania has been to ensure that DR is effective and responsive. As such, Watania tested the failover of its critical applications to CloudHPT in Dubai. Watania’s applications ran on the cloud for eight days without a hitch over this period. BIOS managed the full switchover and switchback outside working hours, ensuring that the business was never disrupted, and that the entire operation was conducted with zero loss of data.
Martin Sebastian, CIO, Watania, said, “We ran our entire production in DR with 100% user capacity and successfully completed the switchback. The exercise was a great experience and a confidence booster for Watania. Everything went smoothly obviously with some lessons learnt as well.”
BIOSME has delivered over 60 successful DR projects to customers across the GCC and continues to support public and private sector organisations across a range of industries.
Dominic Docherty, MD, BIOSME said, “Disaster recovery is an essential business strategy to ensure operations stability in challenging and uncertain operating environments. We are happy to be able to support Watania and its customers in ensuring business continuity over the foreseeable future.”
DR enables organisations in the GCC and elsewhere to continue functioning in the event of a catastrophic event. A strong DR solution can make or break an organisation’s ability to recover natural or manmade setbacks. When every second of downtime means lost revenue, disaster mitigation demands quick thinking and immediate action.
