Latest news with #AWS-native
Time of India
2 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Disaster recovery is cornerstone of IT resilience, not just compliance: Girish Nayak, ICICI Lombard
Disaster recovery remains a critical yet often overlooked aspect of IT resilience , with Gartner's 2025 Market Guide revealing that 70% of organisations are poorly prepared, and 66% suffer from 'mirages of overconfidence'. In this high-risk landscape, ICICI Lombard stands out by transforming disaster recovery from a mere compliance checkbox into a fully automated, cloud-native backbone of business continuity . Speaking with ETCIO, Girish Nayak, Chief Technology and Health UW & Claims, shares how the insurer's strategic approach safeguards 100+ critical applications and AI workloads across AWS regions, setting a benchmark for resilience. ICICI Lombard recently shifted its disaster recovery setup to a fully automated, cloud-native architecture between AWS regions. What were the key operational and technical hurdles during this move? And how did you balance automation with the need for control and compliance? Transitioning to a fully automated, cloud-native disaster recovery (DR) architecture across AWS regions required us to reimagine traditional DR constructs. Key challenges included managing complex interdependencies across 100+ critical applications, automating switchover/switchback workflows, and ensuring secure replication of critical workloads without impacting ongoing operations. We overcame this by adopting AWS-native tools like Elastic Disaster Recovery, Step Functions, and Lambda to orchestrate automation while maintaining granular control over execution. Compliance remained central, our Infosec team supervised the entire activity, and controls were embedded into each automation layer to meet regulatory standards. Disaster recovery often stays in the background until an incident occurs. What prompted ICICI Lombard to revisit its DR strategy at this scale, and how did you ensure buy-in across business and tech teams for something that's often seen as a cost centre? The evolving nature of risk, from climate events to cyber threats, made it imperative to elevate disaster recovery from a compliance checkbox to a core resilience strategy. This mindset shift was key in securing buy-in. We aligned our DR objectives with business continuity priorities and demonstrated how an always-available, cross-region infrastructure minimises potential loss of revenue and customer trust. Extended DR operations, rather than short tests, helped stakeholders see its real-world value. By running business-critical apps from our DR site for an extended period, the entire organisation could validate its readiness, turning DR from a tech-led task into a company-wide preparedness model. ICICI Lombard has been experimenting with AI across underwriting, claims, and customer service. How does a re-architected infrastructure support these use cases, and what trade-offs are you seeing between speed, flexibility, and governance? Our AI initiatives, from underwriting optimization to real-time claims validation, require highly available, scalable, and low-latency systems. The new DR setup strengthens this foundation by ensuring consistent performance and data continuity, even during disruptions. It allows AI models to remain operational with minimal fallback time and supports faster re-deployment across regions. We are mindful of the trade-offs: while speed and flexibility have improved, governance is reinforced through automated observability, policy-based execution, and version-controlled infrastructure to ensure responsible AI deployment. As the dependency on cloud platforms deepens, how are you approaching questions around vendor lock-in, cross-region redundancy, and long-term scalability? Was there a deliberate choice to stay within a single cloud ecosystem for DR? We have consciously embraced a single cloud ecosystem for disaster recovery to maximise native service integrations and reduce architectural complexity. That said, our multi-region design within AWS provides geographic redundancy, fault isolation, and long-term scalability. We are cognizant of vendor concentration risks and continuously evaluate our portability posture by adopting cloud-agnostic standards where feasible and keeping critical backups accessible. Our strategy emphasises resilience and agility, with room to adapt as the cloud landscape evolves. From a broader strategy lens, where does disaster recovery fit into your ongoing tech modernisation efforts? Are you treating it as a compliance-driven layer, or is it becoming part of your core architecture thinking around resilience and availability? We do not see disaster recovery merely as a compliance necessity. A fully operational and available disaster recovery is the cornerstone of our IT resilience strategy. It sits at the heart of our architecture principles, guiding how we design systems, manage data, and structure failover logic. Our modernisation journey, from legacy DR on-prem setups to today's cloud-native, fully automated recovery environment, is a proof point of this shift. For us, DR is not an afterthought. It is a capability we build in from day one, ensuring availability, continuity, and trust in every customer experience we deliver.
Khaleej Times
14-02-2025
- Business
- Khaleej Times
SUDO Consultants forges strategic partnership with Coca-Cola at LEAP 2025
In a ground-breaking moment at LEAP 2025, SUDO Consultants announced a strategic partnership with Coca-Cola, one of the world's most iconic and globally recognised brands. This collaboration marks a significant milestone for SUDO, reinforcing its position as a leader in cloud transformation, delivering scalable, well-architected solutions that enhance business resilience, optimise SAP environments, ensure disaster recovery (DR) readiness, and enable full cloud migration to AWS. SUDO Consultants x Coca-Cola: Pioneering digital excellence together The landmark agreement was formalised at the Coca-Cola office during LEAP 2025, marking a strategic alliance between SUDO Consultants and Coca-Cola. This partnership highlights SUDO's expertise in AWS-powered digital transformation, with a strong focus on full cloud migration, optimisation, and disaster recovery (DR) strategies, ensuring Coca-Cola's infrastructure is secure, cost-efficient, and highly scalable. The signing authorities for this partnership included: Hameedullah Khan, CEO of SUDO Consultants Syed Kareemuddin, IT Infrastructure and cybersecurity manager at Coca-Cola This collaboration was facilitated by Aakash Sapra from SUDO Consultants, reflecting SUDO's ability to partner with global enterprises, offering cutting-edge AWS solutions that drive efficiency, security, and operational excellence. By aligning with Coca-Cola's cloud-first vision, SUDO is empowering enterprises with cloud-driven strategies that eliminate on-premise infrastructure limitations and unlock the full potential of AWS cloud adoption. Why SUDO is a trusted AWS Partner for cloud transformation As an AWS Advanced Partner, SUDO is the preferred choice for leading enterprises because of its deep expertise in AWS migrations, SAP modernisation, security, and cost optimisation. Companies like Coca-Cola trust SUDO for their: Cloud Migration to AWS – Seamlessly transitioning from on-premises or hybrid infrastructure to a fully AWS-native environment. Industry-Specific AWS Solutions – Delivering tailored cloud strategies to support SAP workloads, disaster recovery, and automation. Security-First Approach – Implementing robust security frameworks that comply with SAMA, NCA, and PCI DSS standards. FinOps and Cost Optimisation Expertise – Helping businesses reduce cloud waste, optimise AWS spending, and maximise ROI. Proven Track Record with Global and Regional Enterprises – Successfully migrating and securing cloud workloads, ensuring high availability and performance. End-to-End Digital Transformation – From consultation to deployment, automation, and continuous cloud management. A partnership focused on innovation and business growth As SUDO Consultants celebrates this landmark collaboration, the company remains committed to helping enterprises transition seamlessly to AWS, modernise their IT landscapes, and ensure long-term cloud success. This partnership is not just an agreement—it's a step toward enabling Coca-Cola's future-ready cloud transformation with scalability, security, and cost efficiency at its core.
