Closing the disaster recovery gap: enabling resilient operations across the MEA region

Orange Business is seeing a growing number of enterprises across MEA reassess their resilience and disaster recovery strategies as geopolitical uncertainties and infrastructure dependencies put business continuity under pressure during prolonged disruptions.

Traditional resilience strategies focus on recovery after an incident. But during a systemic crisis, businesses also need architectures that keep critical operations running while conditions remain unstable. CIOs are moving from a reactive “restore after failure” model to a more agile continuity approach that maps technology dependencies and supports operations through periods of instability.

This iterative resilience includes strengthening backup and recovery architectures, adopting multi-site and cloud-based redundancy, automating failover processes and continuously stress-testing recovery readiness to maintain services under adverse conditions.

“Recent escalations have made enterprises realize they need to be more proactive and flexible when it comes to resilience, but this is not easy with the complexity and distributed nature of modern interconnected infrastructures,” explains Sahem Azzam, President of IMEA and Inner Asia at Orange Business. “As a trusted partner with a local and international footprint, we are uniquely placed to help CIOs right-size their resilience strategy and do what is necessary in terms of disaster recovery based on current risks to ensure they can continue operations during periods of turbulence”.

CIOs must treat business continuity as an evolving capability, not a one-time plan in today’s volatile digital landscape.

Building resilient, future-ready operations

Across the MEA, the challenge is no longer whether to accelerate digital transformation but how to build trusted cloud and platform foundations that enable innovation while ensuring secure, resilient operations.

By leveraging the scalability and geographic diversity of cloud infrastructure, enterprises can help ensure data remains accessible, even in the event of catastrophic failure.

Orange Business supports this through hybrid cloud resilience with secure replication in its sovereign offer, Cloud Avenue, alongside co-location in secure data center environments. Data can be segmented and mirrored based on business requirements.

A resilience plan should also include real-time monitoring, automation and embedded cybersecurity controls to enable rapid detection, response and recovery. Orange Business works closely with Orange Cyberdefense to strengthen resilience through continuous security oversight and threat expertise.