Backups alone aren’t enough. Ziad Nasr explains why rapid recovery and staff empowerment are key to business resilience in the Middle East.

If the events of recent months have taught us anything, it’s how quickly the ground beneath our feet can shift. For businesses across the Middle East, the sudden escalations we’ve seen from airspace closures disrupting airlines to GPS jamming affecting over 900 marine vessels are a stark reminder of how fragile continuity can be. In moments like these, the ability to recover and resume operations quickly becomes not just a technical consideration, but a matter of business survival.

Yet too often, organisations focus only on backing up their data without truly planning for how fast they can bring it back online when the unexpected strikes. In a region where political, economic and environmental turbulence can unfold overnight, that oversight can prove costly.

The hidden cost of downtime

Every organisation today runs on data, whether customer records or operational systems. Without rapid access to it, even the most resilient business grinds to a halt. Industry surveys have found the median cost of downtime sits at around US$125,000 per hour. Just three hours of disruption can wipe out US$375,000, and a single disrupted eight-hour workday edges close to US$1 million.

These figures aren’t confined to any one sector. Airlines navigating complex airspace closures, banks processing millions of transactions daily, and hospitals delivering time-critical care, all depend on their systems being up and staying up. The IT system failure at Heathrow earlier this year, which left thousands of passengers stranded and cost airlines millions, is a sobering example. The impact of such outages ripples outward: eroded customer trust, regulatory penalties, reputational damage.

In short, the question isn’t if an incident will happen, but how fast you can recover when it does.

Why backups alone aren’t enough

It’s tempting to treat backup like an insurance policy, a box to tick and forget about. As long as your data is stored somewhere, you’re covered, right? But what many businesses discover too late is that traditional backup systems, while effective at preserving data, often fall short when it comes to restoring it quickly.

When a cyberattack or hardware failure hits, backed-up data that remains inaccessible for hours, days or weeks, is no better than lost. Unfortunately, that’s the reality for many organisations today. A 2024 IDC survey found businesses experienced an average of more than four data-related disruptions per year, and a quarter suffered over ten. Alarmingly, nearly 30% cited staff shortages as a major barrier to effective recovery.

These challenges are particularly acute in the Middle East, where IT teams are often stretched thin and tasked with ambitious transformation agendas. When outages occur, relying solely on overburdened IT staff to manually restore systems, often by visiting each machine or location in person, creates a dangerous bottleneck.

Empowering non-IT staff to act

This is where the conversation must shift from simply having backups to enabling rapid recovery, ideally in a way that doesn’t require specialist intervention.

Think of a bank branch in Riyadh unable to serve customers because of a system failure. Or a regional airline grounded by a ransomware attack while trying to reroute flights around closed airspace. In both cases, waiting hours or even days for IT specialists to arrive on-site is unthinkable.

A smarter approach is to equip frontline employees, even those without technical expertise, with tools and processes that allow them to restore systems at the push of a button. Often referred to as one-click recovery, this concept simplifies and automates recovery workflows so that non-IT staff can get core systems up and running quickly, while IT teams focus on more complex priorities.

For businesses in the Middle East, where skilled IT talent is scarce and often concentrated at headquarters, such empowerment is not just a convenience but a necessity. It can mean the difference between a brief disruption and a catastrophic loss of revenue, customer confidence and market share.

What to look for in a recovery solution

As business leaders seek to strengthen their resilience, it’s worth noting what sets an effective rapid recovery solution apart.

First and foremost, simplicity. The ability to restore entire systems or devices with minimal steps, ideally through a single interface, is invaluable. Next, flexibility. The solution should work seamlessly across diverse environments, including remote sites, air-gapped networks, or dissimilar hardware. It should support cloud, hybrid and on-premises systems. Finally, empowerment. Recovery processes should be intuitive enough for frontline staff to execute confidently without waiting for overstretched IT resources. When these conditions are met, the speed of recovery accelerates significantly.

By embedding these capabilities into their resilience strategies, organisations can better weather whatever comes next, be it a cyberattack, a geopolitical event or a routine hardware failure.

The time to act is now

The risks businesses face today are not hypothetical. Data loss, ransomware, human error and natural disasters are everyday realities, and their frequency and impact are only increasing. The Middle East is no exception; if anything, our region’s fast-growing digital economies and unique operating challenges make the need for resilience even more urgent.

By investing in rapid, easy-to-use recovery solutions and empowering all staff to play their part, businesses can not only survive these critical moments, but emerge stronger and more trusted. Because in the end, it’s not just the quality or security of your backups that counts, it’s how fast you can bring your business back to life when minutes matter.

By Ziad Nasr, General Manager at Acronis Middle East

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