By some accounts, the amount of digital data in the world is doubling every two years. Meanwhile, the number of places where that data is located seems to be growing at a similar pace. Together, these factors are contributing to a significant backup dilemma for today’s extended organizations.
With business operations increasingly decentralized as part of the transition to mobile, remote and hybrid working models, most businesses report their data now resides in more places than ever before. In a 2020 study by the UK-based Institute of Directors, some 43 percent of organizations were unable to identify the location of critical data.
With more data and more types of data scattered across multiple data centers, cloud platforms, edge servers and endpoint devices, it’s no wonder that conventional backup processes are being overwhelmed.
In a recent Vanson Bourne survey of more than 3,000 IT decision-makers, 58 percent said their backups fail regularly, leaving their data unprotected and irretrievable in the event of an outage or a cyberattack. Additionally, 95 percent reported unexpected failures in the previous 12 months.
Moving Backup to the Cloud
The consequences of such failures are severe, compromising business resilience, derailing IT initiatives and impacting the bottom line through unanticipated remediation costs. There are potential reputational costs as well — more than half of those surveyed by Vanson Bourne say that backup failures can lead to a loss of confidence in their organization from customers, employees and stakeholders.
To address such risks, nearly half of survey respondents said they are planning to adopt a cloud-based Backup-as-a-Service solution by 2023.
In addition to closing gaps in your data protection strategy, a BaaS solution will also relieve staff of the daily backup management burden. It’s common for organizations to use a dozen or more different backup devices, all with separate processes and management systems. That complexity is one reason why backups frequently overrun the allocated backup window.
BaaS eliminates that complexity by allowing you to connect IT systems — even offsite systems — to cloud-based resources managed by a third-party provider. Customers can run backup, restore and failover functions with just a few mouse clicks from a central console. There’s no more worrying about rotating and managing tapes or hard drives.
More Benefits
Robust automation capabilities further streamline backups, allowing you to set up processes for gathering, compressing, encrypting and transferring data to the provider’s servers on a regular schedule. Additionally, any new data and data changes will be automatically backed up. This not only shortens the backup window but helps minimize the chance of human error that could cause backup failures.
BaaS also makes it easier to implement the 3-2-1 backup rule, which is generally considered the gold standard for data protection. The rule states that you should store three copies of your data on two different types of media, with one at an offsite location — in this case, on your provider’s infrastructure.
BaaS also has a positive impact on the bottom line. Unlike on-premises backup environments, cloud-based backup requires no capital investment for equipment or software and makes data backup an operational cost. According to a new Total Economic Impact study from Forrester Research, a BaaS solution can produce a 78 percent return on investment with a six-month payback time.
Unrestrained data growth and the continued decentralization of data sources make backup more challenging than ever before. Backup-as-a-Service is a simple, reliable and cost-effective solution that can significantly improve your data protection capabilities. To learn more about migrating to cloud-based backup, give us a call at 949-716-9500 or contact us online.
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