Kotak Mahindra General Insurance’s Significant Shift to Cloud-based DR Model

Like everyone else in the business, Kotak Mahindra General Insurance has set up a cloud-based DR site for an effective disaster recovery. While highlighting the priorities, Suresh Sankaranarayanan, CTO of Kotak General Insurance, said “We had three key thoughts when we wanted to set-up a DR site. First was the ability to scale-up, without having to make huge upfront investments. The second was skills and operational ease since it becomes an uphill task to replicate specialized technology skill set in the DR site. Lastly, and very importantly the risks around cloud and the security framework.”

Kotak Mahindra General Insurance team evaluated cloud-based solution as the most perfect solution. According to Sankaranarayanan, “In a cloud-based approach, scalability is an on-demand features and can be done in a few clicks.” He added, “In the cloud, the greatest risk is “security”. If one has to take the DR site to the cloud, security posture has to be improved multi fold.” Sankaranarayanan emphasised that the challenge can be handled only by creating a culture of heighted security awareness within the organization, by involving all stakeholders. “All stakeholders automatically support the push to an upgraded Security framework. Thus a journey to the cloud finally results in an enhanced security posture which is most desired”, he said.

The cloud-based DR project is one of the prime technology initiatives for the company, spearheaded by Sanakranarayanan and his team members. Talking about major advantages, DR automation and management service implemented offers built-in data replication. DR SLAs are monitored real-time, with visibility to automated DR drills and tamper-proof audit/compliance reports.

Sankaranarayanan while summing up said, “The end result was a DR Site built on a scalable model at optimized cost woven around a strong security framework.”