In a recent LinkedIn Live session, we talked about the undeniable impact COVID-19 has had on IT. From the immediate sprawl of a newly remote workforce, to supply chain impacts, to a marked increase in cybersecurity and ransomware attacks, IT has had to adjust FAST.
To support these shifts in demands, 91% of IT organizations have increased their reliance on cloud services. Time to market, web-based services easily accessed from home, elasticity, and scale of storage — the benefits are clear.
But while it’s easy to enter credit card information and provision fast, it’s not as easy to put the cloud to work and truly realize the value. COVID-19 illuminated a clear inflection point for many IT organizations, based on where they were with their Digital Transformation (DX) plans prior to the crisis. If they had plans, those plans were invariably cloud — so they accelerated their plans and their capabilities. If they didn’t have DX plans, then most hunkered down, focused on “keeping the lights on” activities. This created an even greater “digital divide” between those using IT to accelerate their business goals and those simply trying to stay viable.
In our Veeam Data Protection Report 2021, we highlight what is keeping IT teams from executing on DX initiatives. 53% report being too focused on operations during the pandemic to focus on new projects, 49% feel they don’t have the skills or expertise on staff, and 35% don’t have the time.
Modernizing data protection has become an imperative, with cybersecurity resiliency rising to the top of desired outcomes. At Veeam, we recognize the cloud is a fast way to modernize, but we also recognize that not everyone has the time or expertise on staff to bridge the gap.
Enter: Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). In fact, we covered this in another LinkedIn Live Session discussing the research results that prove the future of data protection is “cloudy.”
Because of that, Veeam partners with a global network of cloud and managed service providers in 180+ countries to architect, deliver and optimize BaaS and DRaaS powered by our cloud-ready data protection capabilities.
So, if you too want to accelerate cloud adoption, overcome staffing and time challenges to realize the value of cloud, here are some services to consider.
BaaS for your Data Center
Off-site backup is often cited as one of the top use cases for the cloud. In a pre-COVID world, it usually topped “productivity/collaboration!”
Veeam-powered service providers provide pre-built cloud repositories, seamlessly integrated with Veeam Backup & Replication with a feature called Veeam Cloud Connect. Cloud Connect creates a multi-tenant gateway for the provider, making it easy for you to enter in some simple login information and set up a cloud repository for backup copy jobs using the same wizard to target any other on-premises repository.
By using a Cloud Connect Off-site Backup service, you’ll be able to scale your backups to the cloud for retention, secure recovery and more. Plus, experts will be on-hand to get the most out of your cloud investment.
For the record, as much as I firmly believe that every organization (from SMB to enterprise) should have cloud-services as part of their data protection strategy, I am equally committed to tape as a long-term retention mechanism for organizations with highly regulated data or those under certain compliance mandates. But even for those organizations that need tape, they do not need to store everything to tape (only the long-term mandated subset) — and they do NOT need to manage their own tapes, because that is often where the “burden of tape” comes from; operational management, handling and off-site transportation.
GOOD NEWS: you can have your cake (tape) and eat it too (no burden) courtesy of those service providers that offer Tape-as-a-Service options, ensuring that you use the cloud for what it’s meant for (scale, elasticity, recovery) while still employing ultra-low-cost options for those 7-, 10-, 25-year and longer retention needs as an offline media type.
BaaS for Endpoints
As more critical company data resides outside of the traditional data center and instead within endpoints working from home and remote/branch offices (ROBOs), many IT organizations are reconsidering previous backup policies that excluded endpoints from the equation.
But while you may not have the time or expertise to back up these devices at scale, many of our Veeam-powered BaaS providers have cracked the code. Using our remote monitoring and management tool, Veeam Service Provider Console, providers can install backup agents and policies en masse to protect Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac machines.
And while local storage options are available, Veeam Cloud Connect is directly integrated with the Veeam Agents, offering direct-to-cloud backup, which is managed by the provider.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
The cloud inarguably provides clear value through enhanced capabilities and better outcomes. And what could be a more imperative desired outcome than ensuring that your business processes persist regardless of what happens in IT (because stuff does break)? That means that every organization needs a reliable disaster recovery solution or what IDC refers to as Digital Resilience.
Veeam has launched a host of capabilities targeted at disaster recovery use cases, including NEW Continuous Data Protection (CDP) in Veeam Backup & Replication v11. Over the past few years, we’ve been delivering a lot of critical enhancements to Veeam Cloud Connect Replication to make DRaaS easily achievable for Veeam Backup & Replication users.
Veeam-powered DRaaS providers can leverage the same multi-tenant cloud gateways used for backups to also capture and host replicas in the cloud. They can then use these replicas to help you put together a failover plan.
Should you ever need to execute a failover, the provider will then have the infrastructure and networking in place to make your experience as seamless as possible. Just as important as the secondary infrastructure, most DRaaS providers bring a huge amount of experience in BC/DR planning to their customers; so you can supplement your IT teams’ knowledge, without ramping your staff headcount. Expertise alone is enough of a reason to go seek out a DRaaS provider, but their technical solutions (using Veeam) are great too.
It has been said that with Veeam’s latest releases, we’ve “Democratized Disaster Recovery” which frankly is a wild oversimplification of how much advanced-level expertise and technology goes into building a DR strategy and its associated failover plans. Adding cloud-based DR capabilities is different than traditional site-to-site (mirrored datacenter) DR architectures; from configuring the hardware plans, to establishing tenant accounts, to pre-configuring all necessary networking appliances, it can be a massive amount of work; but you are offloading that work and harnessing the expertise of a service provider that lives and breathes disaster recovery, so that you don’t have to (as much).
The time is now to try out Veeam-powered services
Before I get off my soapbox, I want to finish by stating that consuming Veeam via an as-a-Service model is a great way to modernize your backups. Whether you’re looking to enjoy tape without its operational “burdens,” accelerate your cloud-first initiatives, or simply give your team a night off — there are a lot of reasons why “the cloud” should be part of your data protection strategy.
To find a provider in your area, check out our Veeam-powered Services Directory to find Off-site Backup, DRaaS, and more from our Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partner network.