Belhasa International Secures Business Critical Data with Acronis Hybrid Cloud Backup Solution

SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, October 15, 2016 - Acronis, a leading provider of hybrid cloud data protection, today announced that Belhasa International has deployed Acronis Backup Advanced to tackle its significant backup and cloud storage requirements. Acronis' integrated solution allows Belhasa to seamlessly backup its critical physical and virtual environments, and store this business-critical data in reliable and secure cloud storage.

Belhasa International is a family-run consortium headquartered in Dubai. The organisation has more than 8,000 employees spread across 40 locations within the Middle East and beyond. Its subsidiary and associate companies operate in areas such as construction and engineering, insurance, tourism, fast food, real estate, and driving institutions.

Many of Belhasa's challenges arose from the speed and nature of the company's growth - it evolved rapidly from an import-only organisation to a large consortium with diverse interests. The company's IT environment is spread across 40 location, consists of two data centres and 42 Windows servers, as well as 1,200 active users, which made protecting business critical data a challenge.

Belhasa's goal was to carry out the initial backup at each site, then centralise and consolidate those on- premise backups via the cloud. Belhasa's IT team quickly realised that most prominent backup vendors supported either local backup or cloud backup, but not both. Furthermore, if cloud elements were supported, the team found that it was very basic, offering limited connectivity to services such as AWS or Microsoft Azure, and at additional cost.

"We needed multiple remote sessions to manage our backups, and dedicated connectivity between locations was expensive. This made it difficult to manage backups and ensure that we could provide disaster recovery across all our office locations. We needed centralised management across all our business verticals, with systems and data backed up both locally and to a secure remote location, all of it controlled from a single management console," says Syed Abbas, Group Senior Systems Engineer with Belhasa International Company.

Acronis Backup Advanced provides world-class protection and fast, flexible disaster recovery for all systems in an environment, regardless of complexity. The solution was ultimately chosen because it combined local backup and cloud services into a single, fully-integrated backup solution. The Acronis Backup to Cloud solution provided support for both physical and virtual environments, for application-aware backup and recovery, and also included reliable cloud storage that could be trusted with Belhasa's business-critical data.

The Belhasa team worked with specialist company FixIT Computer Technologies (an Acronis Platinum Partner for the GCC) to plan and size the Acronis installation. Together, they aligned the core features that matched Belhasa's corporate IT strategy and goals for the next five years.

"We are delighted to have Belhasa International as a valuable addition to our portfolio of high-profile customers in the region," said Guurprit Ahuja, Director - Middle East and Africa, Acronis. "Acronis Backup Advanced has helped Belhasa meet its RPO for each business unit, it has reduced the company's RTO by 50% from two to one hour, and offers greater control with a centralised management console to view backups centrally. These features have given the Belhasa IT team confidence, and an improved management experience, which is a testament to the capabilities of Acronis' solutions."

Acronis also worked directly with Belhasa, and offered guidance on its various products, so that a suitable solution that answered each of Belhasa's requirements was deployed. Belhasa's IT team then tested the solution over a period of six months to understand its flexibility and reliability, test its capabilities, and become comfortable with its interface. Testing revealed that the Acronis solution performed well in all backup and recovery aspects, including a two-hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which decreased by 50%. The solution was also found to offer greater command on recovery location and repository.

"Acronis has cleverly solved the major pain points of managing our valuable, complex and distributed volume of data. Even better, its cloud capabilities eliminated our dependency on dedicated connections between offices - these can be rather expensive in the GCC. We can say with confidence that this backup solution gave us the best flexibility, with the lowest cost footprint on our existing platforms, and the platforms that we tested. Overall, we are delighted with the reliability, cost-effectiveness and ease of use that Acronis Backup to Cloud has delivered," says Abbas.

Acronis sets the standard for hybrid cloud data protection through its backup, cloud storage, disaster recovery, and secure file sync and share solutions. Powered by the Acronis AnyData Engine and set apart by its image technology, Acronis delivers easy, complete and affordable data protection of all files, applications and operating systems across any environment-virtual, physical, cloud and mobile. Founded in 2003, Acronis protects the data of over 5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses in over 145 countries. With more than 100 patents, Acronis products have been named best product of the year, and cover a range of features, including migration, cloning and replication. Today, Acronis solutions are available worldwide through a global network of service providers, distributors and cloud resellers. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com.

Amber Dale

+971 50 795 2652