AXA Gulf insures against
application downtime with Paessler

About AXA Gulf

AXA, one of the largest global insurers, is a worldwide leader in Insurance and Asset Management with a purpose of empowering people to live better lives. In the Gulf region, AXA has been present for almost 70 years, offering a wide range of insurance products and services for corporate, SME and individual customers.

“Insurance is a 24-hour business and we can’t afford to have our data centres and applications down when our customers need help. Our technology is absolutely business-critical.”

Suresh Lakshmikanthan, IT system Administrator, AXA Gulf

AXA is one of the largest global insurers in the world. Its portfolio includes car, travel, life, home, and health insurance products and services, meeting the needs of businesses and consumers alike.

The company has been present in the Gulf for almost 70 years and is one of the largest international players in the region, covering the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar. It has 25 branches across the Gulf, with a workforce of over 800 employees serving over one million customers.

The challenge

Insurance is a 24/7 business, people need to be able to get in touch at any hour of the day regarding their policies, cover, and claims, so technology downtime is not an option – the company can’t afford to stand still for even a minute.

The systems team at AXA Gulf is responsible for running the business’ data centres and ensuring the corporate systems and applications are up and running at all times. The team has a detailed checklist of performance indicators which it reviews on a daily basis to ensure the business’ data centres and applications are running as they should be. The checklist encompasses the key areas that can impact applications and data centre performance including memory and disk space, storage, hardware and servers, WAN, ping rates, application URLs, and temperature and humidity. Historically, this was a manual process which was often challenging and always time-consuming.

Enter PRTG

AXA Gulf made the move to using Paessler’s PRTG network monitoring solution in 2017 and worked with Paessler’s UAE partner, GWC Networks, to implement the platform.

With PRTG’s sensors collecting data from the entire business’ technology infrastructure, AXA Gulf now has much better insights into how its data centers and applications are running. It’s able to monitor performance from a central dashboard to present an overview of key performance indicators. The team can easily review the daily checklist and can see at a glance when potential issues flag up on the dashboard during the working day. Out of hours, alerts can be shared via email or a mobile app to the relevant team members to ensure they are aware of any issue. This round the clock approach to monitoring puts the team in a strong position to take insightful action to address any potential issues before they impact the business, whatever the time of day.

Given downtime is such an issue to the business, the team has a responsibility to report application issues to the senior management team. If issues do occur for any reason, the team is able to access historical data in order to identify what led to the problem and prepare reports and actions plans to share with the management team.

Sensors and alarms status from AXA Gulf’s PRTG instance

The business benefits

The use of PRTG across AXA Gulf’s applications and data centres has had a huge impact on reducing potential downtime across the business.

For starters, the team is able to complete its daily checklist much more quickly and easily than before, freeing up time which is a valuable resource for any business.

In addition, with the PRTG dashboard and alert system, it now has much better visibility throughout the day and night on potential issues that it can then quickly prioritise and address before they become big problems.

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