Veeam helps Thailand-based Dhipaya Insurance switch to digital insurance and improve IT system effectiveness by 99%. Surachai Viboonkitchod, Director of Information System and Network Administrative Department, Dhipaya Insurance, says: “Data is at the heart of our business. If it’s lost or damaged, it will have a serious impact on the company. With Veeam, we can safeguard our data with confidence 50% faster while keeping risks to business operations at a minimum.”
Dhipaya Insurance is a casualty insurance company that provides four main categories of insurance: car insurance, fire insurance, health insurance and miscellaneous insurance.
Dhipaya Insurance has been in business for 70 years and found much success in its ‘Trust & Simple’ concept. ‘Trust’ refers to the company’s strong shareholder structure, which includes the government sector and state enterprises, and ‘Simple’ means enabling customers with easy access to services through state-of-the-art technology.
Challenge
Technology is a driving force behind rapid change, one of which is consumer behavior. Nowadays, most products and services are transacted online most of the time. This means that Dhipaya Insurance must continuously keep up with these changes by using technology that meets increasing demand and complies with legal requirements while still being aware and prepared for the ever-increasing risk of cyberattacks.To ensure Business Continuity and efficiency, a backup solution that securely protects and recovers systems and data securely is essential.
The business challenge
Dhipaya Insurance, one of Thailand’s casualty insurance giants, was facing major digital disruption due to the increasing number of customers that want to conduct business transactions online. Because of this change, Dhipaya Insurance wanted to make sure it adapted effectively to these changes in customer behavior.
Adapting doesn’t just mean buying modern technology but finding the right technology to avoid falling victim to ransomware and to counter the increasing risk of cyberattacks where cybercriminals knew the importance of data as part of compliance regulations.
“Corporations need to study the risks as well as legal requirements to ensure that their business has exponential growth,” said Surachai Viboonkitchod, Director of Information System and Network Administrative Department at Dhipaya Insurance.
“We wanted to become a digital insurance company leader so choosing the right and cost-effective technology is extremely important. In order to provide our customers the best customer experience with innovative products that meet their needs, protecting personal data is an important goal for the company.”
“Data is at the heart of our business. We need to be confident in our data backup availability in case any of our data is damaged or lost. This is of utmost importance because compromised data can cause disruptions to our business operations, which would lead to enormous loss. We need a solution that can safeguard our data and keep business operation risk at a minimum.”
The Veeam solution
Dhipaya Insurance found Veeam at an IT seminar almost 10 years back when they were looking to virtualize their systems. The company decided to go with Veeam since it could meet their needs at that time.
It is important to choose the right data backup service provider that offers ease-of-use and flexibility that is backed up by a team of skilled support personnel and resources. Because of the company’s poor experience with their previous legacy backup solution and the system virtualization success that’s supported by Veeam, Dhipaya Insurance decided to switch to Veeam Availability Suite, a data protection solution that could meet all the company’s needs.
Dhipaya Insurance implemented Veeam to back their essential system data up, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and almost all the company’s other systems. Veeam currently backs up about 50 TB of data across 300 virtual machines (VMs) on almost 95% of Dhipaya Insurance’s IT systems.
“After choosing Veeam to be our IT partner, we have been able to lay a framework to set a new strategy, and we were able to see clear results immediately,” Viboonkitchod said. “While we initially chose Veeam based on its reliability, Veeam has also been able to meet our requirements for product efficiency. The time we spend on IT work has decreased, and this has led to cost reduction while our operational performance increased.”
In addition to reliability and product efficiency, flexibility was another benefit that Dhipaya Insurance saw when they began to use Veeam Direct Restore to AWS. “Veeam can integrate and perfectly back AWS data up. We don’t have to do much beyond simply enabling it,” Viboonkitchod said.
“Veeam also has the technology for monitoring work to reduce the burden on administrators that makes the team’s work easier, reduces the burden of data checking and produces and stores reports for audit checking, which improves the company’s confidence in another way.
“In the future, the importance of technology to Dhipaya Insurance will increase and we have a roadmap with Veeam that’s in line with our company’s direction.
“We no longer wait for risk to occur; rather, we proactively choose to reduce the likelihood of it happening at all, and that’s how we can build business confidence.”
The results
Backup times reduced by 50%
Previously, it took six hours for Dhipaya Insurance to back its data up, per system. With Veeam, this time was cut in half, even when the company had to perform a full backup on all of its systems at the same time. This meant that production performance wasn’t interrupted, and the system in question can still support customers 24/7 without system downtime due to maintenance.
At least 40% in immediate cost savings
“Veeam’s method of calculating costs is simple and covers all the work from the beginning,” said Viboonkitchod. “We didn’t need to keep paying extra fees for full usage, so our costs could be managed accurately, so we made at least 40% in immediate savings.”
99% increased IT department efficiency
At Dhipaya Insurance, an IT performance framework was created so that all operations could be carried out continuously at high efficiency. By working with Veeam in setting up its backup strategy, the company experienced better-than-expected results.
Dhipaya Insurance’s data backup and recovery was 99% more effective, even though an enormous amount of data from its major systems was backed up every two to three hours. Availability was also 99% more effective, even when recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) was set at a maximum of 15 minutes. When recovery was actually tested, it took much less time than expected.