ICICI Lombard, AWS Deploy Automated Disaster Recovery Solution to Strengthen Business Continuity

#ICICILombard #AWS #DisasterRecovery #CloudInfrastructure #BusinessContinuity #DigitalResilience #InsuranceTech

Chandigarh: ICICI Lombard, one of India’s leading general insurers, has successfully upgraded its disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company has transitioned its DR setup from the AWS Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) Region to the AWS Asia-Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, backed by a fully automated, cloud-native architecture designed to ensure uninterrupted services and rapid failover in the event of any disruption.

This strategic move underscores ICICI Lombard’s continued focus on digital resilience and operational preparedness, particularly at a time when climate-related risks, global IT disruptions, and technology-related challenges are becoming increasingly frequent. The newly implemented DR setup provides seamless failover for the company’s business-critical applications, ensuring that customers experience minimal downtime even during unforeseen events.

A Landmark in Digital Resilience

The DR transformation was executed with end-to-end automation, minimal manual intervention, and real-time validation, enabling the company to test and switch environments with exceptional speed and reliability.

Commenting on the achievement, Girish Nayak, Chief – Technology, Health UW and Claims, ICICI Lombard, said:

“ICICI Lombard has successfully executed a full-site Disaster Recovery drill, marking a significant milestone in our digital resilience journey. In a first-of-its-kind move in the insurance sector, we seamlessly transitioned all business applications to our secondary cloud region, demonstrating our readiness to operate without disruption during unforeseen events. This was not just a test of technology, but a validation of vision. Our partnership with AWS is a cornerstone in future-proofing our digital infrastructure — moving us from recovery preparedness to true continuity assurance. By leveraging a fully automated, cloud-native DR architecture, we have proven that resilience and agility can coexist at scale. The complexity of this automated switchover underscores the strength of our execution teams and our long-term technology strategy. This achievement reinforces our commitment to regulatory compliance, customer trust, and uninterrupted service delivery — ensuring ICICI Lombard remains a digitally forward insurer, ready for tomorrow’s challenges today.”

AWS Collaboration Ensures Robust Recovery

Kiran Jagannath, Head of FSI and Conglomerates, AWS India and South Asia, said:

“AWS is pleased to collaborate with ICICI Lombard to secure its mission-critical workloads, ensuring faster application recovery, greater reliability, and data protection through a fully automated data recovery process. ICICI Lombard has always prioritized its commitment to better customer experience and compliance through a robust technology backbone, and this implementation is a logical next step in its growth journey.”

The deployment leverages AWS-native services including Elastic Disaster Recovery (EDR), AWS Step Functions, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) capabilities to ensure continuous replication of application and database servers between the primary (Mumbai) and secondary (Hyderabad) regions. The DR framework also includes domain-based routing for seamless environment switching, ensuring no interruption to critical services such as policy issuance and claims processing.

Why Automated Disaster Recovery Matters

For an insurer like ICICI Lombard, business continuity and service reliability are crucial, given the scale of customer transactions and claims handled daily. Traditional DR solutions often require manual intervention and longer recovery times, which can lead to service disruptions during critical events.

The automated DR setup not only eliminates these challenges but also provides real-time failover capabilities that reduce recovery times from hours to minutes. This implementation aligns with ICICI Lombard’s broader digital-first strategy, which emphasizes leveraging cloud technology, automation, and modern application architectures to enhance operational efficiency.

Pioneering Cloud Adoption in BFSI

ICICI Lombard has been an early mover in cloud adoption within India’s BFSI sector. The company had earlier migrated its core policy issuance and claims management platforms to the cloud, laying the foundation for a more flexible and scalable digital infrastructure. Over the years, ICICI Lombard has progressively modernized its IT ecosystem, adopting containerized applications, microservices-based architecture, and cloud-native development practices.

The new DR upgrade further strengthens its technology backbone, reinforcing its reputation as a digitally forward insurer. By proactively embracing cloud-based resilience solutions, the company not only meets evolving regulatory and compliance standards but also builds greater customer trust.

Future-Ready Infrastructure

The collaboration with AWS positions ICICI Lombard to handle future operational risks with agility and confidence. By ensuring fast failover, automated orchestration, and continuous monitoring, Aashiyana 3.0-style DR solutions are becoming benchmarks in the insurance industry for business continuity.

The insurer’s long-term technology vision includes expanding its use of AI-driven insights, predictive analytics, and self-healing IT infrastructure to further enhance customer experience and service uptime.

Key Highlights of the Upgrade:

Disaster Recovery transition from AWS Mumbai to AWS Hyderabad Region.
Fully automated, cloud-native DR setup with real-time replication and failover.
Use of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (EDR), AWS Step Functions, and IaC tools.
Reduced manual intervention and improved recovery speed.
A first-of-its-kind DR drill in India’s insurance sector.
Strong focus on regulatory compliance, operational resilience, and customer trust.