Laya Healthcare Deploys Savenet DR Solution in Ireland

Savenet Solutions, a Dublin, Ireland-based cloud data protection company, has completed a cloud DR solution for Laya Healthcare Ltd, Ireland’s second largest health insurance provider.

The DR solution protects Laya Healthcare by enabling the business to carry on trading as normal, even in the unlikely event that its entire head office building was unavailable for any reason.

Laya Healthcare went to market in 2016 for a new DR solution that would protect the business against everything from commonplace technical issues, to a full disaster scenario, where its head office building is unavailable. Savenet won the tendering process and the project was rolled out in late 2016.

Technically, the solution was built around Zerto replication technology. Savenet is a long-term partner of Zerto in Ireland. 60 mission-critical VMs are continuously replicated to the Savenet cloud using Zerto.

This system is achieving a RPO of 15s – which means the DR system is 15s behind the production servers. The time it takes to recover the whole system – RTO is under three hours.

The solution also provides virtual desktops for 150 users to be deployed via secure gateway to the Internet – to allow users to access their critical applications from anywhere. This is particularly useful for the Laya Healthcare customer care teams – who simply relocate a local business resiliency site in Cork, log into their virtual desktops and carry on.

This solution has afforded Laya Healthcare cost savings – 50% cheaper than building a traditional dual-site solution, with improved performance and benefits over a traditional storage-based solution.

Savenet manage everything as a managed service, so the Laya Healthcare team are not unnecessarily involved in tasks such as the DR environment.

Left to right: Ian Brennan, IT director, Laya Healthcare,
Lorcan Cunningham, CTO, Savenet

Cunningham, CTO, Savenet said: “We chose Zerto to be the central component of the solution because it’s the best technology in the market for VM replication. We had already implemented Zerto for several customers prior to Laya Healthcare – and it has proven itself to be extremely reliable – and truly an enterprise product.

“Another reason we chose Zerto is because it can scale to any level and provides other benefits too – for example, it provides great protection from ransomware attacks, due to its ability to roll back a server to a point in time – milliseconds before the ransomware took hold.“

Brennan, director of IT, Laya Healthcare, said: “Protecting our members personal data is of critical importance to our business, so we need a robust and disaster-proof DR solution in place to safeguard our information and ensure our business operations run smoothly in the event of an incident. The DR solution we have in place now with Savenet is hugely important to us. It reduces our business risk and really demonstrates our commitment to ensuring we are always available to look after the needs of our more than 580,000 members.

“A real efficiency with the solution is that there is no longer a reliance on our wider Laya Healthcare IT team to perform a DR failover as Savenet manage everything and monitor the system continually.

“They now operate as an extension of our IT team and the knowledge of our environment is shared with them. This system is flexible and can scale very easily as we continue to grow, and we like that“.

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