Due to increased interest and adoption among enterprises, Evaluator Group is actively covering the backup-as-a-service (BUaaS) market, assessing key products through our Vendor Comparison Matrix. This paper discusses important considerations for customers that are evaluating or in the process of migrating to BUaaS. It is complementary to our “Backup-as-a-Service Fundamentals” Technical Insight paper, which covers key value propositions and solution characteristics of BUaaS solutions as well as important solution evaluation questions.
As laid out in Evaluator Group’s “Cloud Data Protection” Technical Insight paper, BUaaS refers to obtaining backup and recovery capabilities from a third-party service provider. Our research taxonomy focuses on backup software hosted in the public cloud and obtained in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model, because this is the predominant way we see enterprises procuring BUaaS, and the predominant way that BUaaS vendors go to market.
When to Adopt BUaaS
An initial question facing enterprise IT, is when does it makes sense to adopt BUaaS? The first scenario in which BUaaS makes sense is when the enterprises requires protection for new applications and workloads – especially those that are SaaS-based. Data protection is often an afterthought, and this is especially true for the growing roster of software-as-a-service apps such as Microsoft 365 and Google G Suite that are being quickly deployed and are providing critical business services. Uptime for these applications is guaranteed by the service provider, but data protection remains the responsibility of the customer. The BUaaS model, in being cloud-delivered, is quick to get up and running and highly scalable, making it more fluid and adaptable with changing business requirements. The agility and elasticity of BUaaS is an additional benefit because adoption of SaaS applications is often unplanned, handled by a line of business without the oversight of IT. For these reasons, a number of BUaaS solutions catering specifically to Google G Suite, Microsoft 365, Salesforce and cloud-based databases like Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), have entered the market.
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