01-24-18 | Blog Post
As we’ve mentioned before, there are three basic components to business continuity: There’s offsite backup, disaster recovery, and data protection as a service (DPaaS). While offsite backup and disaster recovery are the more well known pieces, data protection has an important role, too. Below are a few examples of practical applications of data protection as a service in everyday business:
Example A: Company A is a data clearinghouse for the healthcare insurance industry, and needed a better way to handle their long-term data archiving and data clearance. They use DPaaS for cloud-based archive storage that’s easily retrievable for compliance reasons. There’s no software or vendor lock-in with the cloud, so if they ever need to restore years-old data, they can do so without worrying about software compatibility.
Example B: A healthcare company was looking to overhaul their traditional tape-based backup system, and turned to DPaaS. DPaaS restores large files faster and more frequently than traditional backup, with no proprietary deduplication of data. In addition, the company can choose their own backup windows, and data is retrievable within hours rather than days, all while remaining in compliance with federal HIPAA regulations. This has saved the company hundreds of hours that would normally have been spent waiting for their data to be restored.
Example C: A SaaS company seeking more agile web development can use DPaaS to quickly restore large databases (think 10 TB) and create zero-byte copies of production databases for dev, testing and QA. When they need to access a database for development or testing purposes, all sensitive information is automatically scrubbed to maintain data integrity.
It’s important to note that DPaaS is not the same as disaster recovery, as it isn’t good at restoring entire systems like DR. Instead, it is more closely related to offsite backup, but is cloud-based and allows for more granular restores at the file or application level.
These are just a few examples of how data protection as a service can apply to you. To learn more or to speak to a data protection specialist, visit our complete suite of data protection offerings, or contact us to get started today.
