BIOS Blog

Disaster recovery (DR) enables GCC organisations to continue functioning in the event of a catastrophic event. A strong DR solution can make or break an organisation’s ability to recover from such a setback, whether this is natural or manmade. When every second of downtime means lost revenue, disaster mitigation demands quick thinking and immediate action.

As Gartner explains, DRaaS is a great option for infrastructure and operations leaders who want to cost-effectively improve IT resilience, meet compliance or regulatory requirements, and address resource deficiencies. But with so many vendors offering all sorts of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) packages, CSOs can easily come down with a severe case of analysis paralysis. But the DRaaS market consists of hundreds of providers, each with varying abilities to support requirements. These requirements encompass different workload types, geographies, levels of onboarding and ongoing support, number of recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) options, and target recovery locations, according to Gartner

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has proved its worth over the course of the pandemic. A recent case study from an MEA wide conglomorate shows how BIOS has helped the entertainment and retail group secure business and operational continuity.

BIOS leveraged their in-country, Gartner-recognized cloud solution called CloudHPT to build a DRaaS solution. 

As the business world acquaints itself with the new normal, innovation and digital competitiveness have emerged as game-changers on the road to long-term agility, according to a Gartner survey of nearly 2,000 CIOs in 74 countries. And as the pandemic proved, digital leadership is underpinned by organisational resilience.

 

But what is the right resilience approach for GCC companies?

Disaster Recovery as a service (DRaaS) has shot into the spotlight over the past year, in large part because of its cost-effective role in allowing organisations to recover data and IT infrastructure even in the most extreme situations. As Gartner defines it, DRaaS is a facility in which the provider manages server image and data replication to the cloud, run book creation, automated failover and failback to and from the cloud, and network element configuration during and for recovery operations.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has proved its worth over the course of the pandemic.

A recent case study from Majid Al Futtaim ventures shows how BIOS has helped the entertainment and retail group secure business and operational continuity.

BIOS leveraged their in-country cloud solution called CloudHPT to build a DRaaS solution for MAF Ventures. Gartner recognized BIOS’ CloudHPT as ‘Visionary’ for Disaster Recovery as a Service.

Adopting BIOS DRaaS solutions instead of purchasing hardware and software (HW/SW) solutions to build capabilities in-house can generate significant value efficiencies. After implementing BIOS DRaaS solutions, they realised a number of significant benefits, including savings of over $1 million.

Enough reasons for expenditure on disaster recovery (DR) have emerged over the past year, from incidents linked to the pandemic or arising from an increase in sophisticated malware exploits. As people continue to work remotely and data and workloads need to remain accessible at all times, DR becomes even more important – but can organisations afford a legacy approach? Is disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) worth considering and can it deliver on the commonly projected cost savings 30% to 50%?

Saudi Arabian CIOs agree that cloud can help them bridge the challenges of flexible working, scalability, security, intellectual property compliance and cost efficiencies.

But it’s understandable that as a corporate leader you may have apprehensions about such a big step. Although the local environment facilitates cloud adoption following the launch of the Saudi Cloud First Policy, each organisation within the Kingdom has its own priorities, workloads and technical concerns.

As with any new technology, migrating to the cloud in Saudi Arabia requires asking a few strategic questions.

IT infrastructure has evolved considerably over recent years, but security considerations have remained static for many organisations. As first enterprise workloads have moved out of the organization to the cloud and then increasingly due to Covid, endpoints have moved from the office to the home, security remains largely focused on protecting the perimeter of the organization.

In addition, traditional servers have been transformed into Cloud workloads, containers and agile development apps platforms, however, it is still common practice to approach this new IT infrastructure with the same security solutions that are deployed for endpoint devices, according to a recent Gartner Report

Moving IT operations to the cloud benefits both large organisations and medium-sized enterprises alike. The flexibility of the cloud to scale up and scale down, the newfound agility to launch services quickly and the cost savings are hard for most companies to ignore. Consequently, there has been a significant uptake in cloud services in the Middle East and worldwide.

GCC cloud market is expected to more than double in value by 2024, growing from $956m this year to $2.35bn at a cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25 per cent, a recent study by IDC reveals.

In the Middle East, as around the world, the coronavirus pandemic saw technology leaders tasked with maintaining business continuity in the face of work-from-home developments, data privacy threats and increased cyberattacks. 2021 could accelerate that trend.

With COVID-19 likely to continue shaping the immediate business ecosystem, CIOs will be entrusted with a greater share of the business. Technology leaders will be under greater pressure to deliver big results and performance metrics will be more closely monitored.

Accordingly, for Middle Eastern CIOs looking to stay ahead of the game in 2021, here are three tech-focused resolutions that are easy to implement and could win management appreciation.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: BIOS Middle East, a leading provider of cloud and managed IT services in the Middle East announces it has established two new cloud footprints in Riyadh and Jeddah to serve customers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. These were built out in late 2020 using the VMware cloud stack which has been the core of BIOS’ UAE offerings in Dubai and Abu Dhabi since 2013. Along with the launch of the new zones, BIOS has also confirmed that the first set of customers have already been onboarded, providing it with strong reference accounts in financial services, healthcare and other sectors.