BIOS Blog

Dubai, United Arab Emirates: BIOS Middle East, a specialist in disaster recovery services, has been appointed Disaster Recovery Service (DraaS) provider by National Takaful Company PJSC, “Watania”, as part of a proactive strategy on the part of the Abu Dhabi-based insurance company to ensure business continuity and embed resilience across its operations.

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.

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.

For the 3^rd consecutive year BIOS Middle East is recognized as the only regional player in Gartner's 2019 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

 

Dubai, UAE, July 3, 2019: BIOS Middle East, UAE’s leading Managed Cloud Provider, announced that it has been included in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant report on Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), for the third year in a row. Gartner's June 2019 Magic Quadrant report on DRaaS, has BIOS Middle East as one of only 11 companies globally and the only company from the Middle East on their 2019 DRaaS Magic Quadrant.

Dubai, UAE: BIOS Middle East, the leading Managed Cloud Provider in the UAE, announced that it has won the Cloud and Managed Services Partner of the Year Award for the Gulf East region by Cisco at their Commercial Partner Summit 2019, which took place in Dubai.

This award is designed to recognize the company, who used best-in-class practices, and serves as a model to the rest of the industry. Areas of consideration include innovative practices and process, architecture-led approach successes, strategic business outcome-focus that result in customer success.

Why do you need cloud based Disaster Recovery?

The number one reason is you can't afford downtime. The headlines out there are filled with crazy stories, although it might not happen to you at that scale, any outage can cause IT admins and CIO's to lie awake at night wondering if they are protected well. Whether you call it IT resilience, data protection, business continuity the reality is you cannot afford downtime due to some unforeseen issue. Hence, it’s not a luxury but a necessity in today’s world. It is critical to be always available for internal and external customers. You know that if you are not able to be reached by a customer they will go somewhere else and find your competitor or even worse your internal customers makes resort to shadow IT that is outside your purview which can cause a whole lot of other issues. When you listen to the news, natural disasters get the biggest headline but normally that is not what is happening in your IT environment. The reality is most of the times you will experience outage because of hardware faults, software faults, malicious ransomware, malicious users or accidents by users.