According to our partner Veeam, the average hourly cost of downtime is £80,500 ($108,000)!
Additionally, 73% of respondents in their study were unable to meet users’ demands for uninterrupted access to applications and data.
As the CIO or IT Director, protecting your business' cyber security and stretching your IT budget are top priorities.
It's true that effective backup for your files and infrastructure is essential, but it's still not where you want to be spending your entire budget. The sheer volume of data and complexity of IT networks seems to grow year on year, making purchasing large and powerful enough servers for dedicated backup out of the question for most SMBs.
Backup-as-a-service is a cloud-based method of securing and storing your files and data by backing them up to the cloud, rather than on-site servers. Monitored and managed by a MSP (managed services provider) like SysGroup, BaaS offers a cost-effective way to leverage the reliability and stability of cloud and eliminate the stress of on-going in-house backup.
1) Maximise your IT resources
Many SMBs struggle financially to employ a well-rounded, full-time IT team, meaning that a few or only one individual shoulder the burden for daily monitoring alongside the pressure to oversee long-term transformation. Cloud BaaS makes the basic, but critical, process of backup something you can responsibly outsource with confidence. You can still monitor and access your files at any time, but you can focus on other tasks as backup becomes a background process.
2) Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO)
On-site backup requires significant investment into hardware, which comes along with maintenance, troubleshooting and, sooner or later, upgrades or replacement. This model simply isn't necessary in an age of cloud computing. Cloud BaaS allows you to pay for exactly how much storage you need, which can also be easily changed if you require more or less.
3) Move to an OPEX purchasing model
This is a significant selling point of cloud computing for many c-suite boards. OPEX spending is easier to budget compared to the significant CAPEX of building a backup system sufficient for your needs. BaaS is a very simple point of entry into the world of cloud, and can be an ideal way to determine if the cloud can simplify other aspects of your IT strategy too.
4) Easily achieve best practices
In the world of backup, it is widely accepted that to achieve best practices, you must adhere to the “3-2-1 rule,” which is:
3 – Maintain at least three copies of your data.
2 – Store data on at least two different types of storage media.
1 – Keep one copy of the backups in an off-site location.
For many companies, getting backups off site can be a challenge because of limited bandwidth, expanding data volumes and lack of resources to build or maintain a true off-site backup repository. However, with Cloud BaaS, you can easily move backup to a cloud service provider with the necessary bandwidth at no additional cost.
Robust security is an additional benefit of BaaS. With traditional on-site backup, a compromised IT network spells complete disaster, because even your backups are corrupted or lost. The data centres used for BaaS incorporate state-of-the-art physical and virtual security, keeping your files safe from any data disaster.
5) Partner with an experienced MSP
A MSP like SysGroup becomes your guide to the cloud when you choose a service like BaaS. You may need a simple data repository, or you may need to have it managed. You may need additional features for security, compliance or sovereignty, depending on where and how you do business. You may choose to use a solution that offers replication in addition to backup so you can have added capabilities for disaster recovery. A MSP helps to explain your options and advise on a strategic plan for success.
6) Simplify and speed up your disaster recovery process
By moving to BaaS, you immediately improve your ability to respond to a disaster or any other event that affects network availability. With your business-critical data at an off-site location in the cloud, you can access and recover it quickly, as opposed to, for example, having backups on tapes sitting somewhere in an underground storage facility.
If you really want to simplify, accelerate and reduce the costs of disaster recovery, you can choose a solution and service provider that also offers cloud-based DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service). This will give you efficient and affordable disaster recovery, with your entire IT infrastructure mirrored to a secure, secondary site.