Backups are not a recovery plan: a restore-testing checklist
Most organisations we assess have backups. Far fewer can prove they restore. Here is the drill we run quarterly with clients.
Read articleOKTAGATE designs, deploys and operates the infrastructure, security and software that keep Iraq’s most demanding organisations running. One accountable partner for hardware, software and everything in between.
A representative view of a managed environment. Figures are indicative, not a live feed from a client.
Most organisations juggle a dozen suppliers and still own every gap between them. OKTAGATE takes the whole chain, from design and supply through installation, integration, security and ongoing operations, under a single contract and a single SLA.
Eight domains, one contract and one SLA. Hover a node, or tab through them, to see what each covers.
Complete facilities from a single 6U comms room to a Tier III-ready hall: raised floor, containment, precision cooling, redundant UPS, NOVEC-1230 suppression, EMS monitoring and structured cabling, all engineered, installed and certified by our own teams.
Campus LAN, high-density Wi-Fi, data center fabric, SD-WAN and carrier-grade routing, designed for uptime rather than for the datasheet.
Assess, harden, monitor, respond. Next-gen firewalls, EDR/XDR, email and identity protection backed by a 24/7 security operations centre.
Tenant design, migration and day-two operations across Microsoft 365, Azure and AWS, with governance, licensing and cost control included.
Learn moreFull-stack web and mobile applications, ERP implementations and bespoke business tools, built in-house by our own developers and handed over with the source code.
See what we buildService desk, on-site engineers, annual maintenance contracts and fully outsourced IT departments, priced per user, per device or per site.
Learn moreIP-PBX and VoIP telephony, contact centres, Teams Rooms, interactive flat panels, digital signage and boardroom AV, deployed, integrated and supported end to end.
Learn moreIP CCTV with video analytics, access control, time & attendance, ANPR, intrusion detection, gate barriers and IPTV on one platform across every site you operate.
Learn moreA full in-house development team sitting alongside the infrastructure and security practices. Web platforms, mobile apps, ERP rollouts and the one-off internal tool nobody sells off the shelf, all built to the same engineering standard as everything else we deliver.
Customer portals, staff intranets, booking and payment platforms, e-commerce storefronts and management dashboards. Responsive by default, and bilingual with right-to-left Arabic and Kurdish support built in rather than bolted on.
Native and cross-platform apps for customers, field teams and delivery fleets. Offline-first where connectivity is unreliable, with push notifications, maps, barcode scanning and device hardware where the job needs it.
Odoo and Microsoft Dynamics implementations covering finance, inventory, procurement, manufacturing, HR and payroll. Configured around your actual process, with data migration, user training and post go-live hypercare included.
The systems no vendor sells for your exact problem: HRMS and attendance, CRM and sales force tracking, POS, fleet and logistics, warehouse management, LMS, ticketing, document approval and workflow automation.
The plumbing that stops your staff typing the same figure into three systems. We connect ERP, POS, banking, telephony, attendance devices, e-commerce and government portals, and we document every endpoint we build.
Because we run infrastructure too, what we build does not get thrown over a wall. Deployment pipelines, hosting on your servers or in the cloud, monitoring, backups, security patching and an SLA on the application itself.
Fixed scope, fixed price, fortnightly demos. You see working software every two weeks rather than a status report, and you own the repository from the first commit.
Workshops, process mapping and a signed functional spec with screens, roles and rules. Changes after sign-off are quoted, not absorbed silently and then argued about later.
Your repository, your accounts, your licences. Full source code, database schema and deployment documentation are handed over at go-live, so you are never locked to us.
Our security team reviews what our developers write. Authentication, authorisation, input validation and dependency scanning are part of the build, not a penetration test surprise afterwards.
Anyone can quote a switch. Very few can hand you a documented, tested, supportable environment and stand behind it three years later. That difference is our entire business model.
CCIE, CCNP, NSE, PCNSE, MCSE, VCP and CISSP-level people on staff, not subcontracted for the duration of a project.
As-built diagrams, IP schemas, rack elevations, configuration backups and runbooks are part of the deliverable, not an extra line item.
Response and restoration targets per severity, reported monthly from the ticketing system, with service credits when we miss.
Spares held in Erbil and Baghdad, engineers who can be on site in Basra, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok, Kirkuk or Mosul the same week.
Change control, access management and evidence trails on every engagement.
Around-the-clock monitoring with named escalation paths, not a voicemail box.
Twelve months on installation and configuration, on top of vendor warranty.
Documentation and support in English, Arabic and Kurdish (Sorani).
Reference designs we have built repeatedly, sized, costed and documented, so your project starts from something that already works.
Three-node HCI cluster with all-flash storage, 25 GbE spine-leaf fabric, hypervisor licensing and a hardened management VLAN. Scales a node at a time.
Veeam or Commvault with an immutable on-prem repository, off-site copy, air-gapped tier and scheduled restore verification. RPO from 15 minutes.
Modular UPS with redundant capacity, in-row precision cooling, hot/cold aisle containment, NOVEC-1230 suppression and full environmental monitoring.
HA next-generation firewalls with IPS, SSL inspection, application control and segmented zones, plus ZTNA replacing legacy remote-access VPN.
EDR/XDR agents feeding a SIEM watched around the clock, with documented playbooks, containment authority and a monthly threat report.
Vulnerability assessment, internal and external penetration testing, phishing simulation and a prioritised remediation roadmap you can budget against.
Tenant hardening, Exchange and file migration, Teams governance, Intune device enrolment, Defender rollout and licensing optimisation.
Teams and Zoom Rooms, MAXHUB interactive panels, ceiling microphone arrays, PTZ cameras and one-touch join across every room size.
3CX, Yeastar or Grandstream platforms with SIP trunking, IVR, call recording, queues, wallboards and softphone or handset endpoints.
Zero-touch branch appliances with dual-carrier failover, application-aware routing, central policy and per-site performance dashboards.
Pre-built, pre-configured rack in a rugged enclosure: switching, firewall, UPS, Wi-Fi, VSAT or LTE uplink and CCTV, shipped ready to power on.
Every device, circuit and UPS in one NMS with thresholds, escalation and capacity trending, so you find out before your users do.
Regulatory pressure, uptime tolerance and procurement rules differ wildly by sector. Our delivery approach adapts to yours.
Core-adjacent infrastructure, DR sites, PCI DSS scope reduction and CBI-aligned controls.
Remote-site connectivity, ruggedised edge kit, OT/IT segmentation and satellite backup.
Sovereign data handling, tender-compliant delivery and long-horizon support contracts.
HIS/LIS/PACS infrastructure, clinical Wi-Fi, patient data protection and 24/7 uptime.
Campus networks, e-learning platforms, computer labs, content filtering and student SSO.
Guest Wi-Fi with PMS integration, IPTV, door locks, POS networks and back-of-house IT.
Plant networks, warehouse Wi-Fi, ERP/MES integration and OT security segmentation.
Core and aggregation routing, MPLS/segment routing, BNG, peering and NOC tooling.
The same four stages on a ten-user office and a forty-rack data hall. Only the depth changes.
Site survey, stakeholder interviews and a documented picture of what you actually have, before anyone proposes anything.
Low-level design, bill of materials, rack elevations and a migration plan with rollback. Reviewed with you, then frozen.
Staged build and pre-configuration in our lab, out-of-hours cutover, acceptance testing against the agreed criteria.
Monitoring, patching, backups, service desk and quarterly reviews, with capacity and lifecycle planning built in.

A 42-rack primary hall and a synchronously replicated DR site, delivered in eleven months without a single unplanned outage to core banking.

Replaced a patchwork of leased lines and consumer routers with a single managed fabric using dual carriers, VSAT fallback and central policy.

Contained an active intrusion, restored production from immutable backups and rebuilt the environment on a segmented, monitored design.
Partner status gives us pricing, escalation paths and pre-sales engineering direct from the vendor, which is what turns a support ticket into a fix.
They were the only bidder who surveyed every floor before quoting. The as-built pack they handed over is now the reference our own team works from.
We called at 02:40 on a Friday. An engineer was on the bridge in eleven minutes and on site before shift start. That is the whole reason we renewed.
Migrating 3,200 mailboxes over one weekend with no lost mail and no help-desk storm on Monday. I did not think that was realistic here.
Most organisations we assess have backups. Far fewer can prove they restore. Here is the drill we run quarterly with clients.
Read articleCarrier realities here are not the ones the vendor slide deck assumes. A practical comparison based on sites we actually run.
Read articleConditional access, MFA, retention, sharing defaults and the ten settings we change on every tenant we take over.
Read articleA free, no-obligation assessment: we survey your sites, review your architecture and give you a written findings report with a prioritised roadmap that is yours to keep, whoever you buy from.