Sanlam has been creating value for stakeholders since 1918 — for more than 100 years. Digital capabilities are critical to transforming their business for client-centric growth. The Group focuses on innovation across their products and services, distribution channels, and back-office processes. Sanlam is on a journey to digital business transformation by digitally optimizing their traditional business to a more efficient tech enabled provider, and investing in new capabilities and assets to build a disruptive 3.0 platform. (see Figure 1 below).
One of the key pillars in Sanlam’s approach to digital innovation includes implementing a Group-wide business intelligence platform through big data and enhanced data analytics.
Sanlam recognizes disruptive threats, cyber risks, and various other risks associated with digitized information. To mitigate the risks, Sanlam has established an objective to ensure high availability of their critical business intelligence platforms, which includes their CDP implementation. Specific objectives include:
Meeting the high availability objectives that Sanlam established for their CDP implementation meant that data in the DR environment needed to be kept consistent with that in production.
Data is continuously being changed in production — either new data ingested, or existing data updated — so Sanlam required a solution that could replicate the data changes as they occurred production to the DR environment. Sanlam investigated several tools, such as Cloudera Replication Manager and DistCp (Distributed Copy) — an open-source tool provided with their Hadoop distribution. However, these tools do not support replication of changes as they occur. Instead, users must create schedules to periodically replicate data incrementally. In the event of a failure, any changes made since the prior replication run will be lost, impacting both the RPO and RTO. Furthermore, these DistCp-based solutions run as standard MapReduce jobs competing for resources with other processes, which can impact production system performance.
Sanlam needed a solution that could replicate the actively changing production data in near-real time without impacting performance so they could meet their high availability objectives.
Following a thorough technical evaluation, Sanlam selected Cirata Data Migrator to automate the migration and ongoing replication of data between their primary and secondary (DR) environments.
Data Migrator is a safe and reliable cloud migration solution that automates the migration and replication of Hadoop data and Hive metadata to the cloud or between data centers. Data Migrator deployment is performed in minutes and requires no changes to applications or business operations. Migrations and replication of any scale can begin immediately and be performed while the source data is under active change, without requiring any production system downtime or business disruption. Data Migrator is the ideal solution for Sanlam and enables them to support near-zero recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), which were critical objectives for their business intelligence platforms.
“We were impressed with Cirata’s unique capabilities for real-time replication without disrupting our production environments. It was critical to us that data in our disaster recovery cluster is kept in sync with our primary cluster as closely as possible to enable a near-zero recovery point objective and recovery time objective. Cirata and its partners provided Sanlam with great support during the product evaluation and initial project deployment. They addressed our questions and concerns in an efficient and professional manner and delivered results within the timeline they promised.”
– Jacques Joubert, Big Data Manager and Architect at Sanlam
