Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC), one of the most prestigious and largest exhibition centres in the Middle East, has chosen eHosting DataFort (eHDF), a managed IT and advisory services provider and a member of TECOM Investments, to provide disaster recovery (DR) facilities for the events and exhibition management systems.
Business continuity and IT disaster recovery, an integral part of the business continuity framework, are of the highest priorities for DWTC with event managers depending heavily on its venue and exhibition management systems that cope with the entire lifecycle of the events. eHDF is providing a disaster recovery hosting site to DWTC in its secure facilities to host three most critical business systems. This includes exhibition and event management system, financial systems and all shared files between the various departments.
DWTC’s initiative to lease the DR IT infrastructure from eHDF rather than build a new data centre comes as part of its aim to convert capex into opex.
Yasser Zeineldin, CEO at eHDF, said: “DWTC organises large scale global events that reflect the strong reputation of the country. They needed to put in place a robust disaster recovery and business continuity management framework that is built around their business and its critical processes. The task entailed providing a highly secure and robust IT environment for their DR site. Through the successful implementation of this project, DWTC is able to gain the confidence of its users and customers by ensuring business readiness at all times.
“Following the implementation, DWTC is assured of uninterrupted functioning of its critical business applications in case of disaster, enabling users to access up-to-date information for all activities related to the events.”
Galal ElTahan, Senior Manager, IT Operations at DWTC said: “Building a data centre was not an economical decision, especially as the scope of the project was limited only to the most critical business applications and did not, therefore, justify the build decision. Additionally, outsourcing has helped us to avoid deploying our resources on this task, enabling us to remain focused on the core business functions.
“The selection process was not easy. After extensive research on the bigger players in the market and their capabilities, we made an informed decision to choose eHDF as our service provider. Its state-of-the-art data centre facilities, reputation in the market as one of the leading and reliable service providers in the region and strong client base were some of the criteria that worked in their favour.”
