By Werner Herbst, General Manager: Enterprise
All it takes is one glance at the headlines to understand how cyberattacks are a danger to every business. The last few years have seen some of the world’s largest and most secure organisations targeted successfully, leading to data being stolen, massive fines levied, and a loss of reputation and customer confidence.
Concurrently, attackers are getting better. They are more determined, and have a range of new tools at their disposal to hone their techniques to achieve greater success. They are also working together, organising themselves into criminal groups that run smoothly, even mirroring the way legitimate entities operate.
Every savvy business leader understands that when it comes to breaches, it’s no longer a case of ‘if’, but ‘when’, and ‘how often’.
For this reason, it is clear that data backup is a critical element of any disaster recovery and business continuity strategy, as a business’s ability to recover, and recover quickly, can mean the difference between the doors staying open, and them closing for good.
Having a full on-premise backup solution can be expensive, particularly for smaller entities with limited IT budgets. This is where backup as a service (BaaS)steps in.
This is a compelling alternative to an on-premises, custom-built backup solution. With BaaS data is backed up offsite by a service provider, often to more than one location, to ensure that every base is covered in the event of a disaster or cyberattack.
Less expense, more scalability
No maintenance headaches
Security and privacy
There are other benefits to a good BaaS solution too. When a customer wants to do backup in their own capacity, they can do it in one of two ways. They can adopt an OpEx or a CapEx model. Since Tarsus Distribution has been growing its ’as a service’ business, we are seeing more and more that our customers have a tendency towards moving away from the traditional way of buying.
They want to only buy what they need and only pay for what they use. With us, there is no capital layout. They don’t need to predict the size of the backup they're going to need; they simply sign up with us and we will provide them with enough storage and backup to meet their requirements.
There is no uncertainty in terms of unexpected costs, and Tarsus can use HPE tools such as Cloud Physics to assist them to size correctly with a solution that can scale as necessary.
They do not need to build and support widespread and expensive local storage solutions. In most instances, users pay a price for the BaaS solution based on the number of licenses they need and the amount of cloud storage the company uses.
A major plus is that this can be scaled up and down as needed, meaning the company need never worry about over- or under-provisioning. As fast as the company’s data volume grows, these solutions can keep up with it, and grow alongside the business. Moreover, Tarsus sells its solutions in local currency, so the customer has no unpleasant surprises and does not bear the brunt of exchange rate fluctuations, as they do when using hyperscale solutions sold in dollars.
Another benefit is that BaaS solutions need little to no management and maintenance from the user. In this way, the solutions provider maintains and manages the software, enabling the company to focus its resources on more value-added business activities.
In fact, BaaS solutions are normally designed to help organisations focus on their core business in mind, instead of having to constantly track, manage and maintain their backup systems and procedures.
With BaaS, backup operations and tasks can be set up to run automatically, and any issues are dealt with by the provider. Moreover, a good solution will enable tracking, notifications, usage, and billing to be managed from a single pane of glass for ease and transparency.
With data protection on every business leader’s mind, having a secure backup is a top priority. The ability to restore data quickly is key in the event of a catastrophe, and any BaaS solution worth its salt will provide users with a range of identity and access management (IAM) and encryption features to ensure that valuable company data can’t fall into the wrong hands.
Furthermore, when users store their data in the cloud through a top provider, they can enjoy an unparalleled level of reliability is achieved, with many boasting 99.99999999999% availability.
Data security and availability also matter if we take into account the highly strict regulatory environments that businesses need to operate in these days. With regulations such as South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) and Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), strict data storage and transfer compliance is needed, and a host of boxes must be ticked.
.png?width=40&height=40&name=XTwitter%20(1).png){kind=small}
