Watania improves IT availability, efficiency, and agility with Nutanix

Watania has improved IT Availability, Efficiency, and Agility with Nutanix. Nutanix has announced that National Takaful Company PJSC (Watania), an Abu Dhabi-based UAE insurance company, has chosen Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) technology. The deployment resulted in a 60% reduction in the company’s data centre footprint and operation costs and increased IT stability, scalability, and flexibility.It has also significantly improved database management and performance of mission-critical applications, such as Watania’s core insurance platform, digital platform, and other peripheral systems such as HR & Payroll, Financial, and RPA, to name a few, with a direct impact on Watania’s user experience and business.

Leading organisations – Abu Dhabi National Insurance Company, Abu Dhabi National Energy Company, and Al Dar Properties – created the company in 2011. The goal was to develop regional ‘takaful’ insurance solutions. The company specialises in personal and commercial insurance, and it operates in strict accordance with Sharia law.

Speaking about the need to overhaul the infrastructure, Mr. Martin Sebastian, CIO of Watania explains, “IT is the backbone of our business, and we are continuously looking at enhancements to maintain its efficiency. The focus is on reducing downtime and maintaining a secure environment while embracing new technologies. Our objective is to guarantee effective operations to the business and better service to our customers.”

“Prior to Nutanix, we were running a complex 3-tier architecture and our hardware was fairly outdated. This made managing the very infrastructure time-consuming. We also faced the challenge of maintaining the availability of our mission-critical applications. The idea was to consolidate and future-proof the IT environment in order to make our operations more efficient, as well as save costs.”

Database management was an issue for Watania, which had a range of databases from different vendors (Oracle, MySQL, SQL) that needed to be handled on top of the fundamental infrastructure challenges.

Mr. Sebastian and his team chose Nutanix after a thorough review of market-leading technologies from several vendors, which included reports from top research organisations.

 “Nutanix ticked all the boxes in our evaluation process, and we understand that they are leaders in the HCI/ hybrid multicloud space, as validated by IDC and Gartner. The solution being completely software-defined, would help us phase out all the silos in the infrastructure and shrink our data center footprint. Nutanix allows freedom of choice from a flexibility standpoint – not just with what hardware you decide to run the software on, but also where your applications and workloads will run. Being a hybrid cloud solution, would give us the flexibility and mobility to run applications, both on-prem as well as off-prem. In addition, due to the scalability of the platform, any new node could be added with ease in order to increase capacity.”

The Nutanix Services team and the vendor’s service partners made the transition to the Nutanix HCI platform simple and painless. Watania implemented Nutanix Prism, which enabled the company’s IT team to manage, run, and monitor the full IT infrastructure life cycle from a single interface. Furthermore, Nutanix Era was introduced, which is a software suite that automates and streamlines database management by introducing one-click ease and invisible operations to database deployment and lifecycle management (LCM).

“For our database consolidation and operations, Nutanix Era has provided unique value. The solution’s ability to provision, monitor and protect our mission critical databases from one screen in a matter of minutes has saved a lot of operational time and cost,” says Mr. Sebastian.

With Nutanix Era in place, the IT team can respond to crucial business application deployments in minutes rather than the weeks it used to take. With the rapid provisioning of new production/development databases, Era has reduced its time to deploy new projects. Watania benefits from a faster time-to-market for new ventures as a result of this. The Era ‘time machine’ function gives a higher SLA of recovery for databases at any point in time, allowing them to recover from any corruption that may occur quickly.

“Nutanix has been an integral part of our digital transformation plan. We couldn’t be happier with the results we have seen so far and look forward to building on the existing relationship that we share with the company,” concludes Mr. Sebastian.