May 6, 2022 | By Greg Dougherty
You probably already know why your organization needs backups as a part of your business resilience strategy, and you most likely know the benefits of having that redundancy built into a business plan. But how much do you really know about managed backups? Managed backups are a force multiplier for your disaster recovery strategy, and by the end of this post, you’ll understand why.
So, What Exactly Does the “Managed” in “Managed Backups” Mean?
One of the first things that set managed backups, or Backups-as-a-Service (BaaS), apart from self-managed backups is that you’re now leveraging a team that is completely dedicated to architecting, deploying, and managing backup and disaster recovery solutions. Employing a BaaS provider means you now have a team with superior knowledge and expertise when it comes to backup products, procedures, troubleshooting, and best practices. Having that level of experience and understanding around backups, file-level recovery, VM recovery, and disaster recovery is a huge value-add in the event of a disaster. You can consider it a brain trust for your backups.
Backups-as-a-Service: Cost Efficiency and Scalability
Similar to other cloud offerings, one of the main arguments for choosing BaaS is the backend infrastructure and scalability. You don’t have to worry about the costly upgrades to equipment like storage devices and networking equipment to move large amounts of data to another site that you own and operate. Leveraging BaaS from a cloud provider will eliminate the need for that, ensuring that you always have data redundancy and scalable storage. No longer will you need to justify new costs for upgrading your infrastructure every few years to handle the increased growth of your backups as your company grows — your managed backups provider will take care of this.
A Backup Solution to Meet Compliance, Security, and Platform Needs
For most organizations, compliance and security are two of the most important features when it comes to backups. What’s great about procuring a managed backup solution from a reputable provider is that compliance and security are two less things you need to worry about. Any established provider will have certain compliances in place to ensure the protection of your data and infrastructure. For instance, opti9’s infrastructure is SSAE 18 SOC Type II and SOC 2 audited, Open-IX certified, CJIS, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA-compliant.
In order to satisfy the unique platform requirements of businesses, many providers also support multiple platforms, which may include VMware, HyperV, physical servers, Linux, or Windows.
Managed Backups Means Support
Last but not least, and arguably the most important feature of a managed backup solution is support. Disaster can strike at any time, and having the ability to leverage that brain trust at a moment’s notice via phone, email, or live chat is invaluable. With providers that offer managed backups, you typically have 24x7x365 access to a team that’s ready to respond accordingly to any incident at the drop of a hat to get your business back on its feet.
Why Leverage Backups from a Provider?
In addition to having support in the event of a disaster, 24×7 support usually includes monitoring of your backups. Your local IT team has a lot to deal with to keep the business running smoothly. Your internal team is already completely tied up from email, application servers, networking, user requests, trouble tickets, and business meetings. And when you add monitoring of backup jobs on top of that, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. BaaS solutions let you take a large portion of the backup responsibility off of your local IT team, including monitoring those backup jobs to make sure they are completing successfully. If there are any issues with your backup jobs, you have a dedicated backups team to proactively action those items and work with your local IT to correct any potential issues.
As you can see, having a reliable, trustworthy partner to manage your backups can provide substantial benefits at multiple levels of your business. Using BaaS with a provider will save you money on massive infrastructure costs while lightening up your internal IT team’s workload to keep their focus on business-critical projects. Not only that, but having a team of dedicated experts on your side to manage and monitor your backups will give you peace of mind knowing that your backups are being handled by specialized backup engineers who know everything there is to know about backups.