10-11-17 | Blog Post
According to a report published by Transparency Market Research, the market for Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) is expected to reach $46 billion by 2024. What is DPaaS, and how does it compare to the well-established backup and DR markets? Are they the same?
Let’s start with a broader picture. There are three basic levels of data protection: Offsite backup, disaster recovery, and data protection as a service. Offsite backup traditionally means taking drives and storing them somewhere else, such as your own data center, a third-party data center, or a place like Iron Mountain. Disaster recovery means replicating your production infrastructure to a second site that’s far enough away so it’s unaffected by disasters such as weather, human error, or technology failures, and then failing over to that site if your production goes down for any reason. You choose the time frame you need (RTO) to fail over to and still maintain business continuity. If you use Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), the power of the cloud is used to spin up your recovery site more quickly than restoring to cold hardware.
DPaaS is different. It specifically protects the data within your application(s), at the application and database layers. For example, if you make a mistake in your database or need to recover an earlier version of a file, DPaaS allows you to restore only that information more quickly than traditional backup methods. This is important, because if you don’t have the ability to restore data loss, there’s little point from a business perspective in bringing up your infrastructure from recovery.
Essentially, DPaaS restores data more quickly than tapes or offsite backup. You can specify more minute recovery periods (every hour, instead of every day for offsite), and have more granular control as a result. For example, you might regularly back up your email, database and web servers offsite every day, but only have DPaaS for your database. If something happened to those specific servers, you might be able to afford restoring data that’s 2-3 days old for your email and web servers, but you need data that’s refreshed more frequently for your database. A data protection as a service solution can solve that problem.
DPaaS and DRaaS are two separate entities that both help maintain business continuity, in different ways. DPaaS protects the data that lives on the systems, and DRaaS helps protect your infrastructure as well as your data. Combining disaster recovery with data protection is a good way to maintain a strong business continuity plan.
If you’re interested in exploring DPaaS for your business, we can help! We offer a complete suite of DPaaS products and can help you with database restores, long-term data archiving, and more. Contact us to get started.
