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. 

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%?

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.

Dubai, UAE, March 18, 2019: BIOS Middle East, the leading Managed Cloud Provider in the UAE, announced that it has been awarded “The VCSP Partner of the Year” by Veeam Software, the market leader in Backup and Disaster Recovery, at the recent 2019 Veeam Partner Summit held in Lebanon.

 

The Veeam Cloud and Service Provider (VCSP) award recognized BIOS Middle East for its Veeam-powered services in 2018 and dedication to enable its clients’ business continuity and the Always-On Enterprise.

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, 10 October 2018 — BIOS Middle East, a leading cloud and managed services provider, has achieved Gold Status as a Veeam Cloud Service Provider Partner.  BIOS Middle East is the first Veeam partner in Middle East to achieve this status.

Veeam is a strategic partner of BIOS Middle East for data protection solutions and services. BIOS Middle East uses Veeam software to provide offsite backup and replication from on premises data centres as well as backup and replication within CloudHPT (BIOS’S Cloud brand).

Veeam Cloud Connect allows for customers with on premises data centres to back up their servers to CloudHPT over the internet. Flexible pay on demand backup retention's and policies can be implemented on CloudHPT through your local Veeam Console.