India’s Policybazaar UAE unit expects full recovery within 48 hours after AWS disruption

BENGALURU: India’s Policybazaar said on Friday that it expects services at its UAE unit to return tonormal in the next 24-48 hours after drone strikes linked to the Middle East conflict hit Amazon’s cloud infrastructure in the region.

“For a couple of days, our entire operation went bust because we were not able to run the website - everything was hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS),” Policybazaar UAE CEO Neeraj Gupta said in an interview.

Policybazaar UAE’s operations are “60–70% up and running now,” Gupta added.

On Monday, Amazon said some of its data centres in the UAE and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes, disrupting cloud services and making a recovery “prolonged”.

The ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which entered its seventh day on Friday, has also affected demand for life insurance policies in the UAE, Gupta said, as consumers delay decisions amid uncertainty.

Demand for motor and health insurance, however, which are mandatory in the UAE, has remained steady, he added.

Data migration requires regulatory approval

The Amazon Web Services outage disrupted a dozen core cloud services, with the company advising customers to back up critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions.

Policybazaar UAE is now working with AWS to temporarily shift its data outside the region, a move that requires regulatory approval, Gupta said.

The UAE’s central bank currently requires insurance-related data to be hosted domestically, but the company is in discussions with the authority and expects the temporary migration to be cleared soon.

The company’s fast-growing UAE operations, launched in financial year 2019, have been profitable for the past four quarters.

In the quarter ended December 31, insurance premiums from the unit rose 62% year-on-year to about 5 billion rupees ($54.50 million), accounting for roughly 6% of Policybazaar’s total premiums of 79.65 billion rupees for the period.