Managed IT Backup Services in Dubai & UAE

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is how long your business can operate without a system before revenue or compliance is impacted. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is how much data loss is acceptable — the maximum gap between your last backup and the incident. These are business decisions, not technical ones, and they drive the entire backup architecture and cost model.

A trading firm in DIFC may need a 30-minute RTO and 5-minute RPO for their core trading systems, requiring continuous synchronous replication to a secondary site. A professional services firm in Business Bay might accept a 4-hour RTO and 24-hour RPO, achievable with nightly cloud backups at a fraction of the cost. We start every managed backup engagement with a business impact analysis session to map your systems to realistic RTO/RPO tiers before any technology decisions are made.

We deploy Veeam Backup & Replication for VMware and Hyper-V on-premise environments, and Azure Backup or AWS Backup for cloud workloads. All backup jobs follow a grandfather-father-son (GFS) retention policy: hourly snapshots for 24 hours, daily backups for 30 days, weekly backups for 3 months, and monthly backups for 1 year — satisfying NESA log retention requirements and UAE financial record-keeping obligations under the Commercial Companies Law.

The critical differentiator is immutability. All backup data is written to immutable storage — AWS S3 Object Lock or Azure Blob immutable containers — configured with a compliance-mode lock that cannot be deleted or modified even by administrators for the duration of the retention period. This is the only technically reliable defence against ransomware variants that attempt to delete cloud backup copies before triggering encryption.

Microsoft's standard M365 service does not guarantee long-term recovery of deleted data. Exchange Online retains deleted items for 14–30 days. SharePoint and OneDrive versioning is not a backup — it does not protect against permanent deletion, ransomware encryption of synced files, or accidental overwrites beyond the retention window.

We deploy Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, creating daily point-in-time backups of all Exchange Online mailboxes, SharePoint document libraries, OneDrive accounts, and Teams data. Backups are stored in immutable Azure Blob storage with a separate retention policy — independent of the Microsoft tenant, so a compromised M365 admin account cannot delete the backup. For a 50-user Dubai business, M365 backup costs approximately AED 400–800 per month.

Failed backups are the most common and most dangerous IT failure mode — critical data is assumed to be protected until the day a restore is attempted. Our NOC monitors every backup job across all clients 24/7. Any failed, incomplete, or warning-state backup job generates an alert within 30 minutes, and our engineers diagnose and resolve the failure before the next scheduled backup window.

Daily backup job reports are sent to your IT manager and optionally to your CFO, providing full audit trail visibility. Monthly backup reports include storage consumption trends, job success rates, and upcoming retention limit notifications — allowing proactive capacity planning before storage quotas are hit.

An untested backup is not disaster recovery — it is a false sense of security. Backup media degrades, restore procedures become outdated, and staff who never practised recovery take 3× longer than estimated during an actual incident. We run quarterly restore exercises: actually recovering a virtual machine or database from backup to an isolated test environment, verifying the application starts, data is intact, and the actual restore time matches the documented RTO.

These exercises are documented with timestamped step-by-step logs and screen recordings, creating an evidence portfolio that satisfies NESA audit requirements and demonstrates to cyber insurance underwriters that your recovery capability is real. After each exercise, we update the disaster recovery runbook with any timing corrections or procedure changes.

Managed backup service pricing depends on the total data volume protected, number of systems, and the RTO tier required. For a typical 30–50 employee company in Dubai, managed backup services start from AED 1,200–2,500 per month and include NOC monitoring, quarterly DR tests, and the backup software licensing.

This compares to the average cost of a ransomware recovery without managed backup: AED 150,000–600,000 in downtime, data recovery costs, and ransom payments for a mid-size Dubai business, according to regional incident response data. Immutable backup is not an IT expense — it is business continuity insurance with a documented recovery guarantee.