BIOS Blog

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.
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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.

If you’re like over one third of businesses, you might not be fully aware of the impact of unplanned downtime. Here are some quick figures – nearly half of businesses experience over four hours of unplanned downtime every four months, and according to Aberdeen, just one hour of downtime can cost an average of $260,000 USD. In other words, a thriving business can expect to lose at least one million dollars a year, if not more, due to IT failures.

In 2017, ransomware dominated the news. Malware like WannaCry and NotPetya sparked global outages. Based on its diminished position in the media, you’d be forgiven for thinking that ransomware represented a lesser threat this year.

While there have been fewer world-shaking attacks, however, ransomware has actually grown steadily more popular, with Sonicwall reporting a 108% increase in ransomware over 2017 levels. Here are a few hallmarks of ransomware growth in 2018.

With business continuity being a big priority for IT, we know you'll want a copy of the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service* report. 

In this report, CloudHPT (Cloud Solution division of BIOS Middle East) has been recognized in the Disaster Recovery as a Service Quadrant  for the second consecutive year. 

With more than 15 years of experience in helping customers protect critical business data and minimize the impact of disasters, we believe this recognition reflects our proven, customer-centric approach with DRaaS solutions that deliver:

• Market-leading security and compliance
• Unmatched visibility and management
• Simple, cost-effective disaster recovery pricing
• World-class on boarding and support

• DUBAI, UAE, August 28, 2018
  
  BIOS Middle East, the Middle East's largest cloud provider with its in region cloud, CloudHPT is pleased to announce, that it has been named by Gartner Inc. in the 2018 "Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service" for the second year in a row.
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  BIOS Middle East, which leverages its in-region cloud, CloudHPT, to deliver its Assured Recovery Services was just one of 10 vendors globally (reduced from 23 in 2017) included in this year's list and was once again the only company from the Middle East.
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  In the Magic Quadrant for this market sector, Gartner analysts evaluated 10 service providers that offer Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), based on their ability to execute and completeness of vision.