What is BaaS? Your guide to backup as a service

What is backup as a service (BaaS)?

Backup as a service (BaaS), also known as online backup or cloud backup, is a managed, third-party service that stores data securely in the cloud — safe from unauthorized access, corruption, and other security threats. The service provider provides and manages the necessary backup and recovery infrastructure, software, and support services.

Using backup as a service enables organizations to eliminate capacity overprovisioning and long CapEx purchasing cycles and switch to OpEx subscription pricing. Just as importantly they can free up resources from infrastructure management to focus on more valuable work.

Why is backup as a service important?

Given the exponential rate at which data is growing and the siloed nature of legacy infrastructure, many IT organizations are finding data backup to be increasingly challenging, time consuming, and costly. These same organizations are seeing cloud adoption provide cost and operational efficiencies as well as strengthened security across industries.

Organizations spending an increasing percent of shrinking or static IT budgets on installing, maintaining, and managing data backup infrastructure want to do more with less but have little money—or time—for other business-critical activities.

Data backup as a service solves their time and cost challenges by supporting:

• The shift to OpEx — Eliminate CapEx and upgrade headaches with easy subscription-based pricing
• Simplified backup and recovery — Eliminate time-consuming infrastructure silos and simplify management by moving backup off-site to a service provider
• Defend data against threats — Provide air gap protection for the most valuable data off-site on redundant infrastructure and when needed rapidly recover it to anywhere

What is the best backup service?

The best enterprise backup services are available from Cohesity and partners. Cohesity has a portfolio of cloud services offerings, including backup as a service (BaaS).

Cohesity has teamed with AWS, the leader in cloud to provide these offerings.

The largest enterprises and organizations depend on Cohesity to protect their data. Organizations consistently report 50% to 70% TCO savings with Cohesity.

What is a backup process?

A complete process for backup as a service will include these steps:

1. Sign up directly via the web with account verification and activation for security
2. Set up of the data encryption and cloud regions in which backup data is stored
3. Registration and connection of on-premises, SaaS, or cloud data sources to be backed up
4. Protection of data sources through automated detections on unprotected data and automated policies.
5. An easy way to restore—instantly and at scale to any point in time—from that backup, should the worst case scenario or a ransomware attack occur

What is AWS backup service?

Organizations can adopt enterprise-class backup as a service for AWS workloads and cloud-native apps. They also can seamlessly extend and migrate legacy workloads and datasets to the cloud as well with a robust multicloud data management solution such as Cohesity. For example, IT teams can backup Amazon EC2 cloud compute and Amazon RDS cloud databases with Cohesity.

What are the three types of backup as a service?

Backup as a service can cover the following other similar backup services.

• Cloud backup — originally came about for backing up consumer data to the cloud, it can also refer to backing up enterprise and business data to the cloud in a SaaS model
• Offsite backups — traditionally took backup data (usually in offline tape media) to another offsite location for safe keeping. Today, cloud is a more common offsite location.
• Cloud-to-cloud backup — the cloud service that backs up cloud data sources. Some backup as a service offerings have this capability

Cohesity and backup as a service

Although the data backup as a service (BaaS) model is attractive to businesses, many also want to be able to manage some data directly with a hybrid approach. Yet legacy backup products don’t provide the flexibility and choice. Instead, IT teams are forced to cobble together disparate SaaS-based solutions from a multitude of vendors while managing different backup products with cloud gateways onsite.

Cohesity and AWS have teamed to offer backup as a service, solving key challenges but most importantly providing choice and flexibility. With the Cohesity solution, IT staff can:

• Eliminate unpredictable backup fees — Not only do you eliminate the CapEx as well as the upgrade costs and hassles of on-prem backup solutions, but you get rolling feature updates, unlimited data restores, and no data egress charges with a single, inclusive OpEx subscription price
• Make hybrid cloud backup easy — Because Cohesity BaaS is hybrid and multicloud, you eliminate complex gateways and silos. Plus, a single unified UI allows you to sign up, connect, and protect your data in minutes
• Protect and get more value from data — Automatically discover and protect both on-prem and cloud workloads. And, most importantly, eliminate data mass fragmentation to free up IT ops personnel while enabling developers and data analysts to do more with data