Objectives

The primary objective of this tender is to appoint a reputable service provider to deliver managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for the Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). The service aims to ensure comprehensive ICT backup, restore, disaster recovery, replication, and business continuity over a period of five (5) years. Specific objectives include migrating existing data, configuring backup and replication jobs on Nutanix infrastructure, supporting regular testing and drills, and managing full invocation processes during disaster events.

Scope

The scope encompasses the provision of managed DRaaS solutions supporting the DBSA’s hybrid environment, which includes on-premise Nutanix infrastructure and cloud components. Key activities include:

• Migration of data from the current service provider.
• Configuration of Veeam backup, replication, and restore jobs for Nutanix AHV workloads.
• Daily incremental backups, weekly full backups, and monthly archiving.
• Regular testing including monthly DR tests, quarterly failover exercises, and full invocation support.
• Support for disaster recovery procedures, security, compliance, and infrastructure requirements.
• Provision of remote monitoring, alerting, root cause analysis, and reporting.
• Management of invocation, recovery, restore, failback, and documentation of procedures.

Technical Requirements

The technical scope includes:

• Support for Nutanix infrastructure and equivalent DR site environment.
• Implementation of backup policies for production, critical, and archival data.
• Replication of at least 30 critical servers daily, with flexibility for scaling.
• Retention of backups for a minimum of 5 years.
• Use of latest reliable technology, including Veeam Backup & Replication, Nutanix clusters, and secure internet connectivity.
• Compliance with relevant legislation, information security standards, and data residency requirements (South African datacenters).
• Provision of an Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE) and support for various OS and database versions.
• Security measures including encryption, IAM, audit logs, malware detection, and ransomware response plans.
• Support for full invocation within RTO (48 hours) and RPO (24 hours), with detailed DR procedures and runbooks.

Skills Requirements

The service provider must demonstrate:

• Experience in implementing and managing DRaaS solutions, particularly with Nutanix and Veeam technologies.
• Provision of CVs for at least two resources with relevant expertise in managed DRaaS support.
• Capability to develop and execute comprehensive implementation, support, and testing strategies.
• Ability to provide 24/7 remote monitoring, incident management, root cause analysis, and reporting.
• Expertise in security, compliance, and disaster recovery procedures, including malware and ransomware mitigation.
• Experience in conducting regular DR tests, failover exercises, and maintaining detailed DR documentation.
• Capacity to support infrastructure scalability, capacity planning, and knowledge transfer to internal teams.