BIOS Blog

A fully managed and secure cloud comes with a lot of advantages for the working reality COVID-19 has brought.

1. For a start it removes the IT Infrastructure away from the office and removes the risks associated with it.
2. It provides for infinitely more scalable remote working.
3. It allows customers to quickly spin up new services as they try new avenues to market such as eCommerce.
4. It makes adding Disaster Recovery extremely easy.
5. Since security is built in; risks to the business from a cyber-attack reduce enormously.
   

The majority of IT security is traditionally focused on securing the corporate network
at the perimeter and the core. The new reality of working remotely due to COVID-19
means the game has changed. Hackers are less interested in bypassing corporate
firewalls now they know they can attack the endpoints much more easily and gain
access that way. In addition, now that all the users are outside of the network,
disrupting a company’s ability to work is as simple as filling up all their available
bandwidth at the data center.

As the impact of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic spreads, executive leaders face pressure to cut costs, but it’s critical to avoid a knee-jerk response. Executive leaders must avoid three cost reduction mistakes that could impede their progress – these are discussed in this report and they are:

1. Making across the board cuts
2. Stifling growth investment
3. Losing stakeholders commitment

According to Gartner, “COVID-19 has disrupted operations and will have prolonged impacts on continuity of operations, modes of working and growth patterns. CIOs need to respond to the crisis with both short- and long-term actions to increase resilience against future disruptions, and prepare for rebound and growth.”

As businesses in the Middle East adjust to the new realities of operating during the COVID 19 pandemic, BIOS is committed to providing thought leadership information and solutions that can help our customers navigate these uncertain and difficult times.

As governments and healthcare workers undertake herculean efforts to protect their citizens from COVID 19, the common theme from all of them to their citizens and residents is ‘stay at home and you will be safe and it will help us contain this virus while we search for a cure and treatment’.

In light of this, almost all companies that can, have now asked their staff to work from home. While we know that staying at home and maintaining a period of isolation will protect our physical health, what about the health of the companies we work for? The health of these businesses and the ability of employers to pay staff during this time is also critical to our well-being and the well-being of society. Company health is directly linked to employee productivity and IT departments across the globe must now focus on enabling employees to work form home the same way as they could previously from the office. With this in mind we have written a whitepaper that we think you will find useful called ‘Keeping businesses healthy in a pandemic’.

The insurance sector in the Middle East continuous to grow and attract new entrants creating both opportunities and challenges for players in this space.

In addition to growth, the market is also maturing with additional government regulation requiring new levels of compliance such as NESA and  IFRS 17. In order to help address these challenges and make the most of these opportunities many marker leaders are turning to the cloud.

The working from home ‘movement’ has long been a hot topic in technology companies. The nature of the job means many engineers work after hours and during working hours they often prefer to work remotely. The recent worrying spread of the COVID-19 virus in the Far East and now in other parts of the globe  has caused many companies to see how viable working from home would be for them (including us at BIOS Middle East). It seems we are not alone with companies like Hitachi, JP Morgan and Chevron all asking their workers to work remotely as a measure against the rapidly-spreading disease.

What’s your plan for an IT Disaster?

Given most companies will experience at least some downtime each year and sooner or later experience a major outage…… it’s wise to have a plan in place. 

In this guide we discuss;

• the types of downtime's companies experience,
• how they happen,
• the impact they can have, both to the business’s reputation as well as its bottom line
• and how planning ahead of time can avoid the worst impacts.
•  

The guide also looks at a unique approach to disaster recovery, namely, disaster prevention which can reduce the chance of an IT disaster and how disaster prevention can be combined with disaster recovery as a service to ensure your businesses has a comprehensive plan for any major IT disaster that will be effective.

In truth most businesses that have any sort of size will want to have backup and also some kind of disaster recovery. But they don’t always. Often Disaster Recovery is perceived as too complicated or expensive. Perhaps this was the case several years ago but things have changed. When considering your companies backup and DR strategy consider some scenarios: 

Which is right for my company?

Its Sunday morning 9 am. You start work but you can’t connect to any of your servers. Your IT checks the server and sees a message ‘Your data has been encrypted. To receive the decryption key send 10 bitcoins to this address’.

Hopefully you’ll be able to restore from backup. This assumes it has been working properly. You’ll be down for a day or 2. The business will be ok but how much will that cost your business?

There are many reasons why companies adopt Disaster Recovery as a Service, either for their on premise environments or their cloud environments. The key reason among them is to protect the business from experiencing downtime. While most businesses can cope with some downtime, an extended period of downtime or significant loss of data and services can often be fatal.