In today’s digital age, data protection is more important than ever. Unfortunately, traditional backup methods don’t offer the level of protection or reliability needed to meet the demands of modern data-driven businesses.

To combat these challenges, many organizations are turning to Backup as a Service (BaaS), or cloud backup. IDC predicts that by 2025, 55% of organizations will have adopted a cloud-centric data protection strategy. The benefits of cloud backup are clear: reduced costs, increased scalability, and faster recoveries. Yet knowing if a Backup as a Service provider is right for you is not as clear.

In this blog post, we’ll break down the top 4 capabilities to look for when selecting a BaaS provider to help ensure your data is protected and secure.

Capability #1: Protection for all your critical workloads

As more and more organizations rely on multiple SaaS applications like Salesforce, it’s important your data is protected across all applications, as well as any other workloads.

It may seem like you need multiple backup vendors to protect your multiple workloads; however, studies have shown that this increases the likelihood of experiencing a cyberattack or incident by 44% when compared to using a single vendor.

It’s no wonder the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Backup as a Service, which named AvePoint as a representative vendor for the second straight year, recommends selecting a BaaS provider that can protect all the workloads you need to protect, suggesting you “pick the solution that offers the broadest support for the workloads that need protecting, rather than using multiple point solutions that address different workloads.”

Read the report: 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Backup as a Service

Capability #2: Meet your compliance requirements

When you store data in the cloud, compliance responsibility is shared between you and your BaaS provider, making it crucial for you both to understand the compliance challenges you may face.

It’s important to remember that compliance standards are not only applicable to your production environment, but also your backups. This is why choosing a BaaS provider who is knowledgeable about and able to help you meet compliance requirements is a must, or risk non-compliance for data privacy or data sovereignty regulations.

For example, if you face data sovereignty requirements, your BaaS provider must have data centers in the geographic locations you need to backup and store data. AvePoint Cloud Backup has more than 15 data centers around the world, enabling customers to dictate exactly where specific data is stored. And for those who already have the storage they like, such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, or your own Blob Storage, you can bring your own storage and still benefit from AvePoint’s regulation expertise.

To ensure a BaaS provider can meet your needs, ask about their knowledge of global, federal, and local privacy regulations. If they don’t have the knowledge or resources in-house, inquire whether they have relationships with specialists who do. The Gartner report also recommends including your risk and compliance teams in these conversations to ensure the risk associated with these issues are well understood.

Capability #3: Advanced security features

Security concerns are top of mind for most enterprises today. A Forrester study found that 70% of organizations experienced at least one breach last year. That’s why it’s no surprise the Gartner report recommends businesses select a Backup as a Service provider based on the ability to protect against ransomware attacks.

Some BaaS providers will offer ransomware detection, scanning your data for anomalies or early warning signs of an attack. While helpful, you need a provider that can go beyond this, offering advanced security features, like built-in storage and encryption or bring your own storage and key, that can ensure your data is safe from any security breaches.

For AvePoint customer Danish Crown, Cloud Backup’s advanced security features, like data encryption in transit and at rest, single sign-on authentication, and delegated administration, were huge wins. But AvePoint’s commitment to cloud security (including SOC 2 Type II or ISO: 27001 certifications) was the big selling point.

Capability #4: Empowers end users to perform restores

Losing or accidentally deleting an essential file or email can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience, especially if it requires the intervention of IT. Traditionally, IT would need to locate and recover the file, which often caused delays and disruptions in productivity for users. What’s more, central IT and global admins are busy enough without this added burden.

If your BaaS provider offers self-service restores, end users can easily recover their own content without assistance from IT. For example, AvePoint ReCenter helps users find their own lost content, enabling them to search for missing files, email, and content across key workloads and easily restore content with one click, without burdening IT or your help desk.

This is a win-win across your organization. Users benefit from the ability to restore their own data quickly and efficiently, minimizing downtime, and IT can focus on more critical issues, without the distraction of menial, administrative tasks like file restores.

Say goodbye to time-consuming file restores: Power End User Experience with Archiving

The Bottom Line

82% of IT decision-makers are concerned their organization’s existing data protection solutions won’t be able to meet all future business challenges. To combat these concerns, now is the time to consider modernizing your data protection strategy with a cloud-centric approach like BaaS.

BaaS is an evolving field and vendors will likely continue to offer new capabilities as they better understand the landscape and to distinguish themselves from competitors. Talk to the backup experts at AvePoint and learn how we can meet your unique needs.

Learn more about the changing landscape of Backup-as-a-Service and get recommendations for shopping for a BaaS vendor in the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Backup as a Service.

*Gartner, “Market Guide for Backup as a Service”, Nik Simpson, Jason Donham, Michael Hoek, 19 June 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.