BIOS Blog

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region is witnessing unprecedented growth in the financial sector, with a surge in both traditional financial institutions and emerging fintech companies. Due to their financial power and increasing connectivity, they are the prime target for cyberattacks and data breaches, making the protection and security of their critical data a paramount concern.

According to a recent study, the global fintech market is projected to reach a staggering $324 billion by 2026, demonstrating the exponential growth of this sector. With such rapid advancements, the need to fortify data infrastructure against potential disasters has become more crucial than ever.

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.

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.