Systemizer TechnicAIA Berhad
The largest public listed life insurance and securities group in Asia-Pacific.
The Challenge
When one of Asia Pacific’s largest insurance and securities groups received a 90% capacity alert from its enterprise IT team, AIA Berhad did what almost every organization did during the Covid pandemic – they re-evaluated their operations, looking at it with a fresh outlook taking into account the changing requirements brought upon by the pandemic. These included a sharp rise in the number of health insurance purchases, and the fact that their IT storage usage was increasing at a rate of 15% monthly. They needed to expand, and fast.
Global microchip shortages and supply chain challenges during that time meant that any new order would take six months to fulfil. Their industry was also faced with another change, in that the Malaysian Central Bank, Bank Negara, issued a new requirement -Risk Management in Technology (RMiT) policy which served to regulate financial institutions’ management of technology risk.
The Goal
Their requirement was simple enough, to deploy a new 1.9TB storage system within 3 weeks. With deployment came some other prerequisites, where AIA required the staging and preinstallation of the database prior to delivery. Another mandatory specification included the storage system firmware level must be exactly the same as AIA’s current storage system.
Critical to this project was the support package which was set at must be 24 hours x 7 days x 365 days with 2 hours response time, 4 hours onsite, 6 hours resolution time.
The Solution
When Systemizer Technic were approached to take up this challenge, it did not take the team long to land on a solution. They proposed a refurbished IBM Storwize® storage system as that enable the very short timeline to be met. With that in mind, the team drew out an IT Architecture storage system plan and compatibility study and presented the findings to AIA.
The solution included managed maintenance services to cover and protect AIA from unscheduled downtime, which was critical to their industry.
The Outcome
The project took just three weeks to deliver, saving AIA months of waiting, and ensuring their monthly storage requirements were met. The solution not only saved them time, but also cost only a fraction of what they would have expected to pay for completely new SAN Storage.
The resulting storage system was successfully upgraded with additional capacity, and AIA was able to meet the RMiT requirements of responding to increased business demand within 30 days.
