By Sanjay Agrawal, Technology Head, Hitachi Vantara
Why service providers are turning to backup as a service
As data becomes increasingly critical to business operations, organisations of all sizes are looking for ways to protect and recover their data in the event of an outage, cyber-attack or other disaster. On-premises backup and recovery solutions, which require significant investments in hardware, software and IT resources are the traditional resources for service providers. Service providers are turning to Backup as a Service (BaaS) to offer enterprises a more cost-effective and scalable alternative to traditional backup and recovery solutions. The adoption of BaaS has been steadily increasing in recent years, and it is expected to continue to grow in the coming years. The BaaS market share is expected to increase to USD 17.73 billion from 2021 to 2026 with a CAGR of 33.15 per cent.
BaaS provides a modern solution that delivers fast, automated backup-to-disk data protection both on-premises as well as in the cloud. It enables service providers to offer their customers a reliable backup and recovery solution that can quickly adapt to changing needs and data volumes. Additionally, the ‘as-a-service’ model enables service providers to offer flexible and scalable solutions, allowing customers to only pay for the backup and recovery services they actually use. As a result, BaaS not only enhances data protection, but also helps service providers to increase their agility, speed and adaptability in delivering backup and recovery solutions to their customers.
While backup is an essential part of data protection, enterprises can also choose to adopt Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) as it provides a more comprehensive solution for data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery, of which backup is only one component. DPaaS is a broader concept that includes backup as one of its core services. It provides a comprehensive solution for data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery. DPaaS includes backup, recovery, long-term retention and disaster recovery services. It offers a unified approach to data protection and helps enterprises ensure data resilience and business continuity.
Understanding the critical nature of DPaaS
In today’s competitive market, a downtime can be financially devastating for any enterprise. However, the costs and business risks associated with downtime are increasing rapidly. A large enterprises with more than 1,000 employees report that a single hour of downtime per year costs their company over USD 100,000 on average, suggests the ITIC 2020 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report. About 88 per cent of organizations that took part in the survey reported that hourly downtime expenses exceed USD 300,000 and four-in-10 or 40 per cent of respondents estimate that 60 minutes of downtime costs their companies USD 1,000,000 or more. Ensuring business continuity and data resilience today has become integral to today’s IT environment.
Enterprises require fast, uninterrupted access to business applications and mission-critical data located on-premises or in the cloud. When unforeseen events occur, enterprises must be capable of having near-instant recovery with minimal impact on their business operations, it’s a critical component for any modern business operation.
This is where DPaaS comes into play, enabling enterprises to adopt a unified approach to data protection with three core service options, which are, recovery copy service, long-term retention service, and disaster recovery service. These services provide a pre-validated and pre-configured service catalogue for operational recovery, business continuity and disaster recovery. They accelerate the transition to a private or hybrid cloud-enabled data protection solution, lower risks caused by schedule overruns,and maintain productivity while data is moved, avoiding downtime and business disruption.
DPaaS helps improve application availability, reduces the amount of data to be recovered, cut capital costs and eliminate tape backup while reducing recovery time from days or weeks to minutes or hours.
The ability to be nimble
The demands and growth of data and data storage are rapidly changing, along with the organisational needs of businesses. Organisations today require backup solutions that can easily adjust and adapt to their growing needs. Agility thus is a critical component, as it allows organisations to change and create backups quickly and efficiently. They need flexible and scalable back up and data protection solutions that can address the changing needs of the organisation.
By using the DPaaS and BaaS service models, organisations can take advantage of a buffer behind the scenes, which can address sudden increases in data volume and throughput. BaaS and DPaaS are still relatively new concepts in India, but they can provide organisations with the agility, speed and adaptability needed to keep up with the changing demands of data and data storage.
A speedy and adaptable solution
The speed of data backup is crucial for service providers offering BaaS. There are two key aspects to consider: how fast the data can be extracted from the source and how quickly it can be stored on the target device. It is important that the backup process does not consume too many resources from the source system, which their client may need for other applications.
A third consideration is how to optimise the backup process, such as using inline deduplication, without negatively impacting system performance. Efficient backup without impacting system performance is essential for those providing Baas and DPaaS services, and they need to offer options that address these concerns.
IT is no longer limited to on-premises data centres. With the increasing use of multiple data centres, local clouds, public clouds and other cloud deployment models, enterprises need a backup solution that can adapt to these changes and support locally captured data exports to different cloud environments. Cloud service providers realise this change in trend and offer BaaS as a solution, which can accommodate the enterprise growth without requiring complex upgrade processes. It is allowing enterprises to back up more data as needed and enjoy the scalability provided by different cloud environments.
The IT industry is undergoing a transformation from CapEx to OpEx, resulting in a shift from a product-centric to a service-centric approach for IT capabilities and services. For them, it’s a more manageable and cost-effective way to shift their focus and resources to more meaningful areas, while safeguarding their client data and content. BaaS and DPaaS offers a practical and efficient solution for businesses to back up their data, content and protect themselves, without adding unnecessary operational overheads.
