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Dominic Docherty

Recent Posts

Could you improve up time and cost with cloud-based disaster recovery?

Posted by Dominic Docherty   Aug 24, 2015 10:51:04 AM

Cloud-based disaster recovery gets you back to business as usual: faster.

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Topics: DRaaS, Disaster Recovery

A Quick Guide to Middle East Disaster Recovery in the Cloud (DRaaS)

Posted by Dominic Docherty   Jun 18, 2014 11:00:00 AM

Create and implement the most effective DR strategy for your organization with the help of CloudHPT’s Disaster Recovery in the cloud checklist. This helpful guide will help you set your DR plan in motion with a comprehensive checklist and detailed information to follow during each step. CloudHPT provides cloud services in MENA and is based in the UAE.

This quick Guide to Disaster Recovery in the Cloud will help you be prepared for anything by checking your way through each stage of the planning process, from initial inventory of applications to seasonal testing of your chosen solution.

Here’s a quick rundown of the checklist:
•List your applications
•Perform a risk assessment and business impact analysis for each application
•Determine each application’s ideal RTO and RPO
•Determine your Disaster Recovery and Backup budgets
•Determine your recovery destination

Applications List: It’s true that you can’t protect your applications if you don’t know where each application is and what its core responsibilities are. A quick export and sort of your VM list from VMware vSphere is a simple start, but a more long-term solution should be put into place.

Risk Assessment/Business Impact: Once your applications are inventoried, it’s helpful to perform a risk assessment and business impact analysis for each application in the company. It’s important to make sure that your Disaster Recovery plan protects what is most important to the business.

Ideal RTO/RPO: It’s not just about the critical importance of an application (determined in the step before), but also the time-criticality of each application. Consider how many and how often the application processes transactions and new data, as well as how soon the application would need to be up and running after a disruption.

Disaster Recovery/Backup Budgets: Each application will have minimum RTO and RPOs; however, budget constraints will most likely only allow certain applications to reach those minimums. A combination of the budget and prioritization list will help you sort which applications need to be addressed first and which can wait a little longer.

Recovery Destination: The site to which you recover is dependent on the type of technology you decide to user to protect and recover your application. Cloud-based DR users can see the replication working, click and test their solution at any time and they have the backing of a service provider in case things get tricky.

For a full comprehensive checklist, download the full guide, Quick Guide to Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery planning here.


If you would like to know more about DRaaS in the Middle East or how our  other cloud services in the middle east can help your company drive down costs and increase business agility, just contact us now.

Learn more about DRaaS in the Middle East:

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Topics: DRaaS, Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery as a Service for the Middle East - DR you can afford

Posted by Dominic Docherty   Jun 1, 2014 10:00:00 AM

For the longest time, disaster recovery for firms in the UAE was a rich man’s game.

Until recently, the costs of effectively protecting against disruption (caused by extreme weather, power outages, hardware failure, and connectivity issues or otherwise) have been prohibitively expensive for all but the largest organizations.

This is because traditional disaster recovery solutions required a 1:1 reproduction of the live environment (running continuously in parallel) to provide effective failover. For large environments, the costs of ownership easily run in to the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

But that was then, this is now. Cloudhpt offers Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) in the UAE for all the Middle East.  It might already be a cliché, but cloud computing in MENA, really has changed everything – particularly for DR with DRaaS. The advent of cloud services in the UAE & Middle East has not only made Disaster Recovery & DRaaS services more affordable, it’s radically improved their quality.

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Topics: DRaaS, Disaster Recovery

It’s time to press stop on Tape Backup and use BaaS in the Middle East.

Posted by Dominic Docherty   May 25, 2014 11:00:00 AM

Regardless of the alleged capacity, performance, reliability and durability of the backup media, the real test of a backup solution – indeed, the sole purpose of it – is how easily it is restored and recovered. However, in a recent survey conducted by data recovery specialists Kroll Ontrack, 60% of the 600 respondents experienced some form of data loss despite using a backup solution. Several common scenarios were identified for the unexpected backup failures.

  • Backup windows were not automated and thus prone to inconsistencies and human error
  • Backup windows scheduled at times when target computer not on/unavailable
  • Backup software failed
  • Backup ran out of destination space
  • File lost before scheduled backup
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Topics: Cloud Backup, Data Storage, BaaS

You don't store music on tape, why company data? Cloud backup for UAE

Posted by Dominic Docherty   May 22, 2014 11:00:00 AM

Making the case for cloud backup UAE (BAAS UAE)

Backup is an intensive process that can put a lot of stress on infrastructure. It touches every part of the environment; from local storage on a server, through that server’s CPU and memory, down the network, past the switches and into another form of storage media.

Every stage of this process has to go right for the backup to complete successfully. Add to this the challenges around inter-compatibility between different systems and the task of managing backup can quickly become hugely time consuming. This is primarily because infrastructure is typically built it stages, over time. Investment comes incrementally, and as the business acquires different products, the idea of acquiring a single backup solution that caters to all of them can seem increasingly remote. However, newer services are getting better at offering an integrated experience; it just comes down to finding a provider with the right offering.

What’s available today?

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Topics: Cloud Backup, Data Storage, BaaS

Is Backup Important? If so why are companies so bad at it?

Posted by Dominic Docherty   May 21, 2014 4:44:00 PM

Making the case for Cloud Backup UAE.

Since there has been data, we have wanted to protect it. Backup is one of the oldest IT functions around, but right now it’s struggling to keep pace with the rate at which businesses are evolving. Legacy backup solutions are failing to scale with the explosive growth in the volume and complexity of data generated by businesses today. Likewise, as environments become more virtualized and infrastructure more diffuse, the older backup methodologies and media used to protect them have become less effective.

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Topics: Cloud Backup

Managing Costs and Simplifying IT Infrastructure in the UAE and Dubai

Posted by Dominic Docherty   May 8, 2014 10:00:00 AM

Do you need your IT infrastructure to deliver greater value and respond faster to shifts in business demands?

The cloud is a new model for buying information technology at a vastly reduced per-user cost. It can help reduce your provisioning and delivery budgets and increase your speed to ROI. It can help you standardize, simplify and centralize your infrastructure and applications. It can also help cut capital expenses when you need to build temporary capacity.

By leveraging the cloud, you will find the flexibility to act quickly when things change. And you will be better able to keep pace with shifts in IT skills and knowledge.

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Topics: Cloud Backup, Data Storage, IT Infrastructure,

Affordable dynamic disaster recovery solution available throughout MENA

Posted by Dominic Docherty   May 6, 2014 10:00:00 AM

CloudHPT is excited to announce the end to many IT and business headaches that have previously resulted from constrained and expensive international bandwidth for anyone connecting to a disaster recovery site from within the Middle East and North Africa.

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Topics: Disaster Recovery

CloudHPT Secures Contract with Alpen Bank for Managed Protection Service

Posted by Dominic Docherty   May 5, 2014 2:03:14 AM

UAE based CloudHPT has secured a new contract to provide Alpen Bank with a Managed Protection Service to protect critical systems and data and ensure business continuity for the business’s key operations.

Over the three-year contract, CloudHPT  will support Alpen Bank with a Disaster Recovery solution that can quickly restore mission critical services, within minutes.

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Topics: Cloud Backup, Disaster Recovery

Cloud Backup Market Facts and Figures for 2014

Posted by Dominic Docherty   Apr 29, 2014 10:00:00 AM

While hosted services aren’t at the top of the budgetary wish list, in comparison to hardware and software, it still counts for an average of 14% of the IT spending. But, where should you aim for when selling cloud-based solutions in the year to come.

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Topics: Cloud Backup