BIOS Blog

Businesses have faced huge challenges and have undergone an incredible amount of change over the past few years, and this won’t slow down in 2023. Each year brings forth the opportunity to enhance your business operations and reduce your overall IT spend. In 2023, one trend that has been gaining a lot of attention is the growth of cloud adoption to perform AI and ML operations. These technologies are being used to automate a wide range of tasks, including data analysis, language translation, and image recognition. In fact, by the end of this year, 31% of organizations expect to run 75% of their workloads in the cloud.

Let’s find out which three crucial IT changes you need to embrace quickly to improve your business in 2023.

The acceleration of digital transformation has led to a corresponding increase in the collection and storage of all kinds of personal and business data. However, the laws governing where this data can and cannot reside along with various mandated controls are complex and ever-changing depending on which country and industry you do business in.

In the UAE, for example, data protection laws require all sensitive data – such as financial, medical or personal information – should not be hosted outside the country. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has its own very strict laws and countries such as Oman, Bahrain and Qatar are currently exploring new laws around data sovereignty. If you operate in an industry where you have any personal data of your customers, such as in; Healthcare, Insurance, or Finance; Data Residency should be high on your list of considerations when moving to the cloud.

According to Gartner, “COVID-19 has disrupted operations and will have prolonged impacts on continuity of operations, modes of working and growth patterns. CIOs need to respond to the crisis with both short- and long-term actions to increase resilience against future disruptions, and prepare for rebound and growth.”

As businesses in the Middle East adjust to the new realities of operating during the COVID 19 pandemic, BIOS is committed to providing thought leadership information and solutions that can help our customers navigate these uncertain and difficult times.

As governments and healthcare workers undertake herculean efforts to protect their citizens from COVID 19, the common theme from all of them to their citizens and residents is ‘stay at home and you will be safe and it will help us contain this virus while we search for a cure and treatment’.

In light of this, almost all companies that can, have now asked their staff to work from home. While we know that staying at home and maintaining a period of isolation will protect our physical health, what about the health of the companies we work for? The health of these businesses and the ability of employers to pay staff during this time is also critical to our well-being and the well-being of society. Company health is directly linked to employee productivity and IT departments across the globe must now focus on enabling employees to work form home the same way as they could previously from the office. With this in mind we have written a whitepaper that we think you will find useful called ‘Keeping businesses healthy in a pandemic’.

The working from home ‘movement’ has long been a hot topic in technology companies. The nature of the job means many engineers work after hours and during working hours they often prefer to work remotely. The recent worrying spread of the COVID-19 virus in the Far East and now in other parts of the globe  has caused many companies to see how viable working from home would be for them (including us at BIOS Middle East). It seems we are not alone with companies like Hitachi, JP Morgan and Chevron all asking their workers to work remotely as a measure against the rapidly-spreading disease.

Dubai, UAE – December 15th, 2019: BIOS Middle East, a leading managed services and cloud provider in the UAE, announced that it has successfully completed Noor Takaful’s migration from on premise to the cloud, to accelerate its digital transformation journey.

Noor Takaful was established in early 2009 to provide a broad range of Islamic insurance (takaful), general and customised insurance products and services to individuals, families, groups and companies in the UAE market.

The worldwide public cloud services market will reach over $221 bn in 2019 and Gartner says the market will reach just under $400 bn in 2023. That’s some growth.

Underneath those headlines, roughly 50% of organizations are using an approach to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) strategy that is a Multi-Cloud in order to leverage best-in-class capabilities from different cloud providers. Gartner predicts companies using Multi-Cloud will increase to above 75% by 2020.

The total cloud spend of the Middle East is estimated to stand at just below 1bn USD but it’s predicted to grow to 4bn by 2022. In fact this isn’t just happening in the Middle East, globally cloud is being embraced by almost all organizations and is expected to hit 300bn of spending by 2022.

But why are so many companies moving to the cloud so quickly?

The phenomenon that is cloud is shaking traditional IT to its core. The growth in cloud services is nothing short of exponential. Meanwhile hardware sales for traditional datacenter technologies declines fast. When we launched our Cloud services in the UAE in 2013 the conversation used to be; “Is cloud really viable? Is cloud secure? Should I consider it instead of on premise?”, now the conversation has changed to; “Which cloud is best for which application? How much of our IT can we move to the cloud? When can we migrate to the cloud?”

Are you being held back by outdated infrastructure? Have your servers and hosts reached end of life? If the answer to these questions is yes then you are not alone. How to deal with ageing infrastructure is one of the biggest challenges being faced by companies today.

In an age where the pressure for digital innovation is intense and is on the tip of everyone’s tongue, many companies are stuck with a dilemma – under pressure to embrace digital technologies to improve business efficiency, yet without the resources to move forward. They want to be lean and streamline processes but don’t have the IT platform to support their ambitions.