Abu Dhabi Ports – Disaster Avoidance and Resiliency

The increased dependency on the IT-based services and the major impact on the company (operational, financial, and reputational) in case of services disruption, are the main drivers of Abu Dhabi Ports commitment to design and implement innovative, integrated and resilient IT infrastructure. The aim is to provide robust IT infrastructure for hosting the smart port program platform and the port community system and to protect the company’s digital assets from both human-made and natural disasters.

In line with this, Abu Dhabi Ports was one of the leading companies worldwide that achieved a 100% virtualization rate of its computes workload, including mission-critical applications. To ensure data security, a new data center has been built to take advantages of the maximum possible bandwidth speed that dark fiber optics technology could deliver. A third data center was also positioned to ignite in case of a major natural disaster that could affect both the primary and backup locations. The scope of the initiative was not limited to the backend (data centers) but was also extended as part of the digital transformation to the workforce. Employees were empowered with a simple and secure enterprise digital workspace platform that delivers corporate applications and collaboration tools on any device, anywhere and at anytime.

Traditionally, active/active infrastructure resiliency setups are complex and expensive to implement. What Abu Dhabi Ports implemented is an integrated and innovative stretched cluster solution that does not only serve as a disaster recovery solution but as a disaster avoidance and resiliency. As a result, dealing with disaster in a proactive manner becomes possible, utilization of resources gets optimised, while automated testing of the recovery process is enabled.