Is Backup as a Service the solution you should be adopting?

Posted on 3 Oct 2022

Are you thinking about updating your data protection to a backup as a service option? We believe that if you aren’t already, you should. Why? The work environment has changed, as have the threats. The technology has changed, and likely now you can provide greater data security and protection with better features at a lower price than what your current solution is costing you today.

What’s changed?

Organizations are more aware of the impact of data loss than ever before. With the explosion of remote working and the increasing sophistication of security attacks, data protection become an executive priority, not just an IT one.

Our background in archiving gave us an early perspective on the data protection/data security landscape. As we saw the pervasive spread of ransomware and its crippling effects, it was clear to us that organizations need more than layer in their data protection and resiliency strategy.

Our team drew on prior experience managing and supporting IT operations to formulate new data protection services to add to the Donoma solution stack.

Recognizing that the first layer in a data protection strategy is backup, we designed our FLxStore backup as a service (BaaS) solution. The design specifications were built on the needs our team needed when they were in your shoes, responsible for data protection.

FLxStore was built based on latest best practices but addressed what didn’t work as advertised in the past. Their requirements included:

Security
Speed
RTO/RPO
Data Control
DR Readiness
Geo-diversity & Sovereignty

Security

Organizational data is a critical organizational asset. Ensuring its security starts with a backup, but there is a great deal more to securing that backup. So FLxStore backup as a service replicates multiple copies of each backup, including one copy to our private cloud located within our SOC compliant data centers.

Speed

Narrowing backup windows and ensuring rapid access to the data for routine file restorations was an important factor. A cloud-only BaaS solution fails when it comes to speed. To counter the slowness of cloud backup, FLxStore includes a maintenance free backup appliance that gets placed inside your network. This appliance is controlled by the onsite IT team, and creates the first local backup that lives onsite within the physical network infrastructure. This local device speeds backup and usually significantly shrinks the backup windows. Because the FLxStore appliance is included, unlike most other backup as a service solutions in the market, there is no additional hardware to buy, support or repair.

RTO/RPO

Returning your organization to normal operations is the number one priority of any backup. It’s also the least tested aspect of most backups in production today. When you need to do a full restore from backup, regardless of what caused it, it’s a high pressure, high visibility, potentially high-risk situation.

At that moment, all eyes are on the IT team responsible, and that is not the time to discover how high a failure rate many backup systems have. Industry surveys show that backup restorations fail up to 66% of the time. Our team had a collective experience in the 50% range, but even that is far too high. So, they opted to license Veeam technology into FLxStore for its performance, reliability, and industry reputation. By doing this, FLxStore has some of the fastest RTO/RPO stats in the industry – as fast as 15 minutes.

Data Control

FLxStore’s hybrid-cloud design and integrated Veeam technology provides you complete control over your data. Your IT team can directly access what they need when they need it. Plus, they get the benefit of Veeam’s interface that makes data management streamlined, and training easy.

DR Readiness

FLxStore was built to offer additional Disaster Recovery readiness. If your IT infrastructure is going to be offline for an extended period, your FLxStore backup can migrate to our FLxDR cloud computing & continuity services. Key services are configured fail over into our private cloud ad continue to process until you are ready to resume operations onsite. These failover services can be for partial systems, or full, and are becoming a required business continuity function for any regulated organizations such as financial organizations, healthcare, and government agencies.

For those organizations who may be able to afford their own Veeam implementation, FLxStore offers an option to be a geo-diverse replication repository that integrates directly with your Veeam subscription.

Geo-diversity & Sovereignty

FLxStore’s design ensures that at least one copy of your backup is safely located away from your location. This becomes very important when preparing for business continuity threats that can come from regional emergencies: from weather to natural disaster to other local disruptions. Additionally, FLxStore backup as a service ensures that your data is always stored within the United States. This becomes important for certain organizations who need to manage data location for regulatory and customer requirements.

Each of these challenges should be part of your assessment of your next backup solution. And while you may have a very clear understanding about the gaps and risks of an outdated backup solution, communicating the issues to create budget for modernizing your backup can be challenge.

To help you, we have put together a free e-Guide: “5 Reasons to Modernize your Legacy Data Protection Strategies”. It provides agnostic advice and information to support your case to update your organization’s data protection before it becomes a problem.

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