BIOS Blog

BIOS Middle East (BIOS), GCC’s local cloud and managed services provider, has achieved Class B Certification from the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This certification ascertains that BIOS is compliant with the government regulations related to cloud computing services and will be able to securely provide cloud infrastructure services to various businesses across different industries in the KSA.

Businesses in Saudi Arabia are accelerating their digital transformation journey with the cloud with benefits such as scalability, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility associated with the cloud.

In response to the fast-paced changes and to drive a cloud-led transformation, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology issued policies and regulations under KSA Cloud First Policy in February 2019 as part of Saudi Arabia’s 2030 Vision.

Digital transformation and remote working arrangements pushed small and medium businesses (SMBs) to leverage the cloud to store their critical data and work processes. While the cloud opens up new opportunities for businesses to scale faster, it also presents a few challenges. One of these is data breach and loss.

According to this 2022 report, the Middle East ranked second on the list of data breach losses after the US, incurring losses of SR28 million from data breaches in 2022 alone.

If you’re using Microsoft 365 to enable remote working, organize online meetings, and keep your data on the cloud, you should know that you can lose your data over a period of time if you don’t perform regular data backups.

The native M365 deployment only provides a Recycle Bin for restoration, which only stores the most recent copy of the data for a fortnight, after which it is wiped from the platform and becomes completely unrecoverable.

According to the Microsoft Shared Responsibility model, Microsoft is only obligated to provide you with an online portal; the responsibility to secure your tenant and protect the data lies solely with you.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to lock themselves inside, leading organizations to embrace the remote working arrangement. As a result, several security measures were neglected, and cyber-attackers found a brilliant new way to exploit system vulnerabilities.

In just two months after the pandemic struck, Saudi Arabia saw over 7 million attacks. The gateway to these attacks was primarily remote desktops and the protocols that employees used to access their resources, increasing the need for a more robust cybersecurity posture.

“Moving to the cloud will save you money.” This statement is almost always assumed true when comparing application hosting (IaaS), backup (BaaS), and disaster recovery (DRaaS) in the cloud to the significant costs associated with owning, operating, and maintaining a traditional datacentre.

But when evaluating costs across multiple cloud providers, especially hyperscale clouds like Amazon, Azure, and Google, a new set of cost levers need to be considered to realize the best combination of cost and performance that meets the needs of your specific business and application needs.

DUBAI, UAE – July 20, 2022 – BIOS Middle East (BIOS), the GCC’s local cloud and managed services provider, has achieved the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Security Trust Assurance and Risk (STAR) Level 2 certification, a stringent third-party assessment of the security of a cloud service provider.

 

BIOS owns, operates and manages its own cloud called CloudHPT, with datacentres in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Jeddah and Muscat. It offers fully managed IaaS and Gartner-recognized DRaaS for over 500 customers in the GCC and beyond.

Did you know that email is the most common gateway for cyberattacks? And given their widespread use, Microsoft 365 (M365) has some startling statistics that clearly demonstrate why M365 email security and protection are important.

⦁ 85% of organizations using Microsoft 365 have had an email data breach in the last 12 months.
⦁ Organizations using Microsoft 365 have seen a 67% increase in data leaks via email since March 2020 t
⦁ With 60% of data breaches attributed to poor patch management, there were 1,220 new CVEs across Microsoft products in 2020 in the common vulnerability and exposures (CVEs) database.

Whether you are a new business or an existing company, achieving business growth now depends on improving system reliability, supporting hybrid work models, modernising work environments, staying secure and adapting to changing market requirements.

Moving to a cloud infrastructure can help achieve these benefits with a single move. Indeed, in most industries, companies now acknowledge the storage, accessibility and flexibility benefits of moving to the cloud. Gartner forecasts that this demand will continue to grow, with end-user spending on public cloud services estimated to grow 21.7% in 2022 to reach aggregate volumes of $482 billion from $396 billion last year. In fact, by 2026, Gartner also predicts that cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending.

Businesses around the world are being wooed by hyperscalers and cloud vendors of all kinds. But not all cloud services are equal. Unfortunately, customers often have to wade through the (significant) marketing claims to formulate an accurate “apples to apples” comparison.

The research team at BIOS Middle East, the GCC's local cloud provider has created a whitepaper where you can see the key differences between its managed cloud and Hyperscalers.