The list of disruptive events has been growing exponentially, so it makes sense that organizations have been increasingly asking their technology departments about their resiliency posture.

There are two essential solutions that every technology leader should consider when shopping around for improving business continuity: Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Backup as a Service (BaaS). While these two solutions are similar, they have differing core objectives when it comes to protecting a business. To learn more about these differences, check out the blog post “BaaS vs. DRaaS: 3 Key Differences to Know.”

In this post, let’s dig into the key elements and benefits of BaaS.

What Exactly Is BaaS?

Here are the components that make BaaS what it is:

• Copies – point-in-time version of your data
• Cloud – the target of your storage is a cloud, either a hosted cloud or a public cloud like AWS or Azure
• as-a-Service

BaaS is different from traditional backup because it is managed by an experienced service provider that removes the daily burden of backup management from your IT staff and provides well-architected solutions that consider industry best practices. Most often with BaaS, offsite copies of data are stored in the cloud rather than an off-site physical vault. Cloud storage adds many features such as immutability, lifecycle management, and speed to recovery. The cloud also affords the ability to transfer or restore data from those copies within a cloud environment, or between cloud environments as needed.

The Primary Drivers of BaaS

Some of the key reasons an organization approaches a BaaS provider could be the following:

• Ransomware mitigation
• Compliance requirements
• Archival requirements
• Reliable data protection for IP and other crucial information
• Faster recovery time

When you choose a BaaS solution, the underlying technology that is copying datasets and transmitting them to the storage location may differ. In any case, if you are moving data from one digital location to another digital location, it’s important that data remains encrypted in transit and at rest.

With more and more sophisticated ransomware attacks, all businesses should include immutable backups as part of their solution – that is, backups that can’t be altered in any way or even deleted. Choosing a solution that supports and enables immutable backups is essential.

Ask yourself, when you need to recover, how will you ensure the fast retrieval of your datasets then deploy the infrastructure to recover? This is where a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution can be of help.

Considerations for BaaS

As you consider BaaS, think about what the goals are behind the solution, and what your organizational goals are, both now and for the long term. Here are a few reasons that might dictate which type of BaaS technology and storage option you choose:

• Degree of backup management
• SLA around backup service
• Maturity of data protection and retention model
• Ability to fit into or complement a DRaaS solution
• Storage lifecycle management to allow lower cost for long-term archived copies

Strategizing Business Continuity

If you are ready to start exploring BaaS solutions for your organization, reach out to one of our experts here. We’d love to have a conversation about how we can help enable your technology vision.