ITAS Mutua, parent company of the ITAS Assicurazioni Group, is Italy’s oldest insurance company, which since 1821 has been committed to protecting its insured members by providing the best possible insurance service and contributing to the social and economic development of entire communities.
With more than 600 agents in more than 400 agencies distributed throughout Italy, has been able to develop and modernize its business over 200 years, while maintaining its being Mutua unchanged, a reality therefore founded on the values of reciprocity, ethics and solidarity, oriented primarily to the Preservation of the common good as the most valuable resource.
A business that has been growing for 200 years is the result of ITAS’s ongoing commitment to building the trust of its members and the result of innovative strategic choices that have added value to the business. Indeed, ITAS is always looking for new challenges to turn into opportunities, but also for new solutions that can make its services competitive and ad hoc for customers.
Hence the need for ITAS to invest in new services that could guarantee continuity, proximity and productivity to the business, in line with the principles that guide its activity and the regulatory requirements that characterize certain sectors such as insurance.
ITAS needed to protect its production environments by ensuring that service was always active and available.
Once again, ITAS turned to Deda Cloud, a trusted partner that has been accompanying and supporting it in business evolution for several years with ad hoc solutions in line with corporate standards and current regulations.
Deda Cloud has built over the years together with ITAS a complex infrastructure with heterogeneous technologies, considering the business of which the client company is a part, the presence of sensitive data, and the importance of the managed information that must always be available to meet members’ requests.
In particular, the most important data that encapsulates the company’s core business rests on high-performance Dell EMC XtremIO storage, where ITAS’ Oracle databases are primarily resident.
All unstructured data such as common word, excel, image, or video files are stored within a Dell EMC Isilon infrastructure, while another critical component that relies on both technologies is the virtualization of desktops for all ITAS users.
The accurate knowledge of the customer combined with theexperience and expertise of the technicians allowed Deda Cloud to propose a Disaster Recovery solution supported by Dell EMC technology, capable of supporting the heterogeneity of technologies in the company and protecting the large amount of data governed.
The complex task of ensuring the availability of IT systems in the event of a disaster event according to the stringent requirements dictated by the business was planned with Deda Cloud with extreme professionalism. I was impressed by the expertise, precision, and responsiveness of the entire Deda Cloud structure that allowed us to implement, maintain, and govern the IT Disaster Recovery solution optimally while also leveraging the full potential of Dell EMC technology on the storage world.
The implementation of a Disaster Recovery aims to make available to the Client, in the face of a possible disaster event on the primary data center in Trento, systems and infrastructure at the secondary data center in Rome, through which Deda Cloud is able to restore IT systems and services according to jointly defined content, mode and SLA.
Specifically, Dell EMC’s XtremIO storage where ITAS’ core business activities reside and the desktop virtualization component are protected not only by classical backup rules but also replicated instantly at the DR site in Rome.
Replication is done using Dell EMC RecoverPoint’s feature that enables instant synchronization (time close to 0) of all data written to the primary storage and also carried over to the secondary DR storage.
The customer therefore at any time he or she decides to access the DR system in Rome will find the same data saved the instant before in Trent.
This is a key element of the DR system because in the event of an extraordinary event at the primary site, ITAS can rely on the secondary site without having lost any data written to the primary storage.
The only data that can be lost, in fact, is that which remains in memory at the computer and has not yet been written to storage.
The DR system thus allowsadditional security for business continuity, as opposed to normal data backup, which at ITAS is still done with state-of-the-art Dell EMC Data Protection Suite technology. The backup is saved to a Dell EMC Data Domain system on Trenton and brought back continuously (albeit at lower storage speeds) to Rome.
ITAS then has available on the secondary site, albeit in different ways, all the main and most critical information, always aligned with the last transaction made.
This solution is then enriched by the Disaster Recovery test, i.e., the “recovery plan” where all the procedures to be carried out and in what order are defined, in order to optimize operations, verify their functioning and be ready to intervene correctly in case of disaster.
Two were the winning elements:
1) Deda Cloud’s expertise, precision and responsiveness in developing and implementing the solution;
2) The quality and reliability of Dell Technologies chosen for the project.
Launching first DR system by moving data from infrastructure in ITAS to Deda Cloud datacenter in Trenton, Italy
Creation of the official DR system in the Deda Cloud datacenter in Rome
New DR simulation following a revisiting of the related infrastructure
Upgrading and adapting the technologies present on the DR site in Rome with development of new projects, including on the cybersecurity side
With this solution ITAS insures its business as well as insures its members. The DR system ensures the continuity andoperation of business-critical areas by avoiding moments of information loss. Replicated on the secondary site in Rome are:
– Data written to storage that through Dell EMC RecoverPoint is recoverable identical to that at the pre incident time.
– Data saved on Trent’s backup system that is reported via Dell EMC Data Protection Suite in Dell EMC datadomain on the secondary site.
Deda Cloud implemented a compliant solution with the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) carried out by ITAS, where the customer analyzed the risk of business downtime by areas by defining the downtime costs and optimal recovery time to minimize the risk.
At the same time, the indices of RTO (Recovery Time Objective), which defines the time required to restore information and restart business, and that of RPO (Recovery Point Objective), which is the number of information the company can tolerate as a loss, are defined .
ITAS has thus achieved its goals:
– Ensure continuous service to its members, avoiding possible business stoppages.
– Obtain a defined and clear recovery plan so that ITAS-defined disaster scenarios can be addressed.
– Implement a solution that is BIA-compliant and in line with industry regulations.
Goals that Deda Cloud has sought from the very beginning to achieve, leveraging the historical relationship that unites Deda Cloud and ITAS and the in-depth knowledge of its infrastructure, taking into account the heterogeneity of technologies and the complexity of the business.
The experience and expertise of the technicians made it possible to focus on the winning choice: Dell Technologies, whose quality solutions made it possible to implement a service that fully reflected the customer’s requirements.
To date, ITAS’s goal for the future is to grow and innovate its business, increasingly improving performance and services for its customers. To do this, it must use equally innovative partners who follow its demands, investing in key issues.
Deda Cloud strives precisely to be one step ahead both on solutions and on the effectiveness of its service and in accompanying ambitious customers like ITAS.
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