World’s largest retail Islamic bank cuts disaster recovery time in half with BMC Atrium Orchestrato

Business challenge
Saudi-based Al Rajhi Bank is the number one Islamic bank in the Middle East and the largest retail Islamic bank in the world. The IT organization supports banking operations in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Kuwait as well as operations of the bank’s stock trading division. Rapid recovery of critical systems in the event of a disaster is a critical requirement at the bank. Despite a growing customer base and an increasingly complex IT environment, the disaster recovery (DR) team must meet an aggressive recovery time objective (RTO) of two hours. In addition, the team must demonstrate compliance with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority’s (SAMA) mandate to conduct an end-to-end DR test quarterly.

BMC solution
​BMC Atrium Orchestrator has enabled IT to automate its formerly manual DR process, reducing the time and resources required to recover critical systems.

Business impact 
With Atrium Orchestrator in place, Al Rajhi customers are assured that, if a disaster occurs, the bank will minimize the amount of time customers are unable to access their accounts.
Recovery of tier-1 applications dropped from four hours to 90 minutes and tier-2 applications are now back online within two hours.
​The number of people required to perform a DR test has dropped from 40 to 15, reducing the cost of quarterly DR testing.
IT expects to achieve additional efficiencies by leveraging other BMC solutions into the DR process to log issues during recovery, ensure that server restart tasks are performed in the correct sequence, and monitor systems during recovery.
“Atrium Orchestrator has delivered such great results with our DR process that I foresee it becoming an integral part of our ITSM environment within the next year,” says Shaheed Nair, head of IT production, Al Rajhi Bank.