March 31, is celebrated as the Word Backup Day. It is a day set aside to remind everyone who uses and touches data to back up their data. And, with the COVID-19 pandemic and hybrid work culture, it is even more important to protect data effectively and regularly.
Out of the data boom and need for intelligent data management, one of the fastest emerging trends on data backup is the concept of Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) that is taking the data world by storm.
BaaS brings many benefits that outstrip its traditional, outdated counterparts. The scalability of BaaS solutions means a significantly reduced cost of ownership and operation compared to the expensive investments and commitment required for physical backup infrastructure.
The scalability of BaaS also means companies are not hampered by the limited physical capacity of traditional backups. Recovery time, which can be significantly important to maintain business operations, is also shortened, especially with Disaster Recovery, which is optimized for as little downtime as possible.
BaaS backup solutions also fall under Operating Expenses (OpEx), while more traditional backup solutions tend to incur Capital Expenses (CapEx). As the CapEx investment can be prohibitively high, this makes BaaS costs more palatable for companies that have had their IT budgets lowered over the years.
Additionally, BaaS offers the benefits of being a managed service, it can be offloaded to the focused and expert solutions provider. With maintenance and management outsourced to a provider, BaaS frees up the skilled resource who can be assigned to more mission-critical or strategic tasks.
The wide variety of data backup and recovery options means BaaS can be tailored to the unique needs of each organization, with backup extending even to applications such as Office 365 or Salesforce. No doubt why BaaS is fast becoming part of India Inc's backup strategy.
The author is Director of Systems Engineering, Commvault (India & SAARC). Views are personal.
