Leejam Sports Boosts Business Continuity Using a Disaster Recovery Solution on AWS

Leejam provides sports and fitness services through its gyms, sports facilities, and concept studios and academies. It is one of the largest fitness companies in the Middle East—and it has ambitious plans for future growth. Any system failure or data loss that disrupted member services or compromised business operations could damage its reputation.

If primary systems failed due to hardware issues, natural disasters, or cyberattacks, Leejam could use the solution to quickly restore operations and protect member data. However, on-premises options were complex and expensive to manage. Leejam needed a DR strategy that could scale with its rapid expansion without the complexity and capital expenditure of traditional physical backup sites. After considering various options, Leejam chose to use Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Leejam collaborated with ZainTECH Solution FZ (ZainTECH), an AWS Partner, for the DR solution. ZainTECH used AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS), scalable, cost-effective application recovery to AWS, in building a secure network architecture for Leejam. The solution uses AWS DataSync, which simplifies and accelerates secure data migrations, and AWS Storage Gateway, which provides on-premises applications with access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. File access and management are thus virtually seamless between Leejam’s on-premises infrastructure and the DR solution. The solution also uses Tape Gateway, a service for backing up and archiving on-premises data to virtual tapes in AWS.

The solution integrates multiple layers of data security through IP restrictions and SSL encryption. AWS CloudTrail is used to track user activity and API usage on AWS, and Amazon CloudWatch observes and monitors resources and applications on AWS.

Since completing the DR implementation in January 2025, Leejam has realized operational improvements. The solution automates testing, replication, and recovery, reducing manual intervention and management overhead. The increased operational efficiency has helped Leejam free up resources for core business and customer needs.

Previously, Leejam’s recovery time objective (RTO) ranged from 4–6 hours with a 1-day recovery point objective (RPO) using daily midnight backups. The DR solution enhances reliability, reducing RTO to 1-2 hours and achieving near-zero RPO—facilitating much faster recovery and minimal data loss in the event of a failure.

The solution supports management decision-making by protecting access to critical data and business systems, empowering support teams to work efficiently regardless of infrastructure disruptions. Costs are lower than before, too, as Leejam pays only for the resources it uses. In the future, the company plans to expand its adoption of AWS services and migrate more workloads to the cloud for better scalability, flexibility, and operational efficiency.

“Using AWS, we moved from reactive backups to a proactive disaster recovery strategy,” says Yasser Almyassar, CTO at Leejam. “The DR solution proved its value immediately: faster recovery, better visibility, and stronger continuity.”