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eHosting DataFort (eHDF), the region’s leading Managed IT and Advisory services provider and a member of TECOM Investments, today announced it has cut down and optimised infrastructure and communication costs for French corporate and private banker Societe Generale’s branches in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Riyadh and Bahrain. eHDF is providing a Disaster Recovery (DR) hosting site to Societe Generale serving all their regional branches and in case of any disaster, the users at these branches can connect remotely to the DR site which maintains a continuous backup of the data. In addition, eHDF’s premises are being used by the bank as a Business Continuity Planning (BCP) seating area for users who connect to the disaster recovery (DR) site in eHDF’s data centre, utilise the LAN environment, access round-the-clock service desk for incident management, problem management and change management, use dedicated telephone lines, access cards and all other facilities in case of a disaster. Yasser Zeineldin, CEO at eHosting DataFort, said: “Data remains the crucial factor for any financial organisation and over the past few years investments and business focus have moved not only towards the security and back-up of confidential data, but also towards disaster recovery planning and implementation. With eHDF now hosting the disaster recovery site for Societe Generale and providing Business Continuity Planning seats, Societe Generale’s regional branches can maintain business continuity through a continuous backup of critical data in eHDF’s secure Data Centres. This solution has helped Societe Generale in reducing infrastructure and communication costs substantially as compared to housing the BCP seats at its own premises.” Through this solution, Societe Generale has achieved a virtualised environment by consolidating nine servers into three, thereby reducing hardware expenditure and manpower required to manage the specialised setup. Earlier, they were using expensive leased lines to Paris that have currently been converted to an Internet-over-VPN link with the use of DSL. These changes will accrue significant benefits and will amount to considerable reduction in the total IT expenditure spend. Abdul-Mannan Contractor, Chief Technology Officer-Middle East at Societe Generale, said: “The implementation of the BCP seats at eHosting DataFort has provided considerable savings a year. The new solution is scalable and has the capacity to further expand in another two years with the growth of regional satellite sites. As technology is added to each business line, more applications will be integrated with the present infrastructure, and since the implementation is scalable, the business growth can easily be managed. “Proper planning and delivery of the solution was one of the main reasons for our association with eHosting DataFort. The entire process demanded extraordinary coordination with third parties, such as telecom service providers, which was successfully handled by eHosting DataFort. The implementation of the BCP seats in the same premises as the Disaster Recovery site was conducted in a seamless manner.” “Above all, the solution has helped us optimise our costs and has provided Societe Generale high return on investment. With choosing eHosting DataFort as our Service Provider, we were assured that we would have secure and reliable hosting Site for our DR infrastructure and data, be it external customer data or internal company data.” With world-class data centres, resilient and scalable infrastructure and round-the-clock managed operations and a team dedicated to disaster recovery and Business Continuity Planning (BCP), eHosting DataFort has established itself as a market leader in the field of managed hosting services. With a wide network of technology and channel partners within the GCC/MENA, Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific regions, eHosting DataFort has been recognized for its innovative use of new technology in 2009 and was also awarded the region’s “Best Service Provider of the Year” in 2008,2009 and 2010. |
For further information contact: Sachin Bhardwaj |
