BIOS Middle East, a specialist in disaster recovery services, has been appointed Disaster Recovery Service (DraaS) provider by National Takaful Company PJSC, “Watania”, as part of a 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 recognized by Gartner as a “niche player” for DRaaS.
BIOSME was appointed after an exhaustive search for local DRaaS providers. Watania sent out a detailed request for proposals to several potential partners and evaluated their expressions of interest against a specific set of criteria and BIOSME was determined as the overall best performer with respect to the financial institution’s specific requirements, Watania officials confirmed.
“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.
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 switch back 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 organizations 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.