Al-Qutaibi Bank- Business Resilience & Disaster Recovery

Business Challenge

Al-Qutaibi Lahdat operates a critical banking workload that requires high availability and reliable service continuity around the clock. Any significant disruption could impact customer services, business operations, and overall banking availability.

CirrusGo assessed the workload’s resilience and recovery requirements and identified the need for a stronger business continuity approach capable of protecting against different levels of disruption—from individual service failures to larger infrastructure and regional incidents.

The key business requirements were to improve service availability, reduce the potential impact of outages, establish clear recovery expectations, strengthen operational visibility, and ensure that recovery procedures could be consistently tested and executed when required.

Business Solution

CirrusGo designed a resilient AWS environment focused on maintaining service continuity and minimizing business disruption.

The approach combines high-availability capabilities with a structured disaster recovery strategy, ensuring that the banking workload can continue operating during localized disruptions while also having a defined recovery path in the event of a wider regional outage.

The solution also introduced centralized operational visibility, automated backup and recovery processes, and a repeatable approach to managing the environment. This provides the business with greater confidence that critical services can be monitored, protected, and recovered when needed.

Business Outcomes

The target design supports a 99.99% availability objective, with defined recovery targets of up to 1 hour for service restoration (RTO) and up to 15 minutes of acceptable data loss (RPO).

Success is measured through the ongoing health of the workload, backup and recovery readiness, service availability, operational alerts, and regular disaster recovery testing.

This gives Al-Qutaibi Lahdat a clearer and more measurable business continuity framework, helping the organization reduce operational risk and improve confidence in the availability of its critical banking services.

Key Business Insight

A key outcome of the project was establishing a clear distinction between high availability and disaster recovery.

High availability helps the business remain operational when localized failures occur, while disaster recovery provides a recovery path for larger-scale incidents, including regional disruptions.

Regular recovery testing is an essential part of this strategy. It ensures that recovery plans are not only documented but can also deliver against the business’s defined recovery expectations when they are needed.

Cost-Optimized Resilience

CirrusGo evaluated different approaches to disaster recovery, considering both resilience requirements and the ongoing operational cost of maintaining a secondary environment.

Rather than maintaining a fully active disaster recovery environment at all times, the selected approach combines high-availability capabilities for day-to-day business continuity with a cost-efficient backup-based recovery strategy for regional disasters.

This approach provides a balance between business resilience, recovery readiness, and cost efficiency, allowing Al-Qutaibi Lahdat to strengthen protection for its critical banking services without unnecessarily increasing ongoing infrastructure costs.