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.

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%?

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’.

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?

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.

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.

• 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.
• 
  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.
• 
  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.
  

Whether you’re looking for a new backup and disaster recovery service provider or you’ve had the same one for ages, there are several questions you should keep in mind to ensure you have the most effective backup and disaster recovery plan.

1. Are you backing up the right files?

Obviously, you need to be sure that your backup and disaster recovery plan covers the most important files for your business. But think beyond just work product and database files: what about system configurations, metadata, application licenses, hidden files and calendar events? Backups of these “edge cases” will be essential to restoring your system from scratch if and when the time comes.