There Is No Stopping Backup as a Service and DR as a Service
It seems that no matter where you look, someone is talking about either backup as a service (BaaS), disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) or both.
BaaS has been well established for a decade, particularly in the consumer and SMB markets. But over the past couple of years, it has more than gained a foothold in the marketplace. In fact, many large companies are now ditching their internal backup and recovery gear in favor of a cloud-based backup approach.
MSPs, therefore, should take note and leverage cloud-based backup and recovery services to capture larger companies.
David Floyer, an analyst at Wikibon, noted in a recent blog post (Mega-Datacenters are the Future) that BaaS now provides the enterprise with the potential of implementing common backup and recovery services in the cloud “that can be tailored to meet SLAs for defining RPO and RTO …”
In other words, MSPs have the ability to offer demanding enterprise clients whatever service-level agreements (SLAs), recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) they require to meet whatever corporate and compliance mandates these businesses have to achieve. By avoiding consumer-focused offerings and sticking with proven enterprise-class services, MSPs can satisfy even the most demanding needs when offering backup and recovery.
Further, such services are relatively plug and play when a reliable partner is involved. Floyer made the point that the metadata around what data has been backed up and where the backup files are stored needs to be secured across different sites. Modern enterprise-class BaaS comes with enough security to adequately protect backup data and its associated metadata.
Wikibon also went on to include DRaaS as a major element of the mega-data center (MegaD) of the future.
“MegaDs can provide much more cost-effective disaster recovery infrastructure between MegaDs sites, and cloud service providers can use this infrastructure to provide failover and fail-back services at much lower costs than the traditional two datacenter approach,” said Floyer.
MSPs are in the process of erecting the very mega-datacenters that he is talking about. A few years down the line, the world of computing will be dominated by massive cloud-based infrastructures that offer services to enterprises that are more comprehensive, more secure and more cost effective than anything they could hope to build internally.
They can also instantly expand their repertoire by relying on specialized players that have already established an end-to-end BaaS and DRaaS infrastructure that meets enterprise needs, such as Zetta.net.
Art Ledbetter is director of channels at Zetta. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly, and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.
