However, one area businesses often fail to consider is their backup and recovery strategy, and how this needs to adapt in a SaaS and cloud-driven environment. Organisations need to ensure their backup strategy has evolved along with their production environment, or risk being unable to recover in the event of a disaster or malware attack.
The migration away from on-premises environments towards SaaS began many years ago. Platforms like Gmail and Google for Business applications have been around for so long that people tend to forget that they are cloud-based. Microsoft 365 is another example – there is no way to consume the Microsoft Office suite anymore, other than as a cloud service. SaaS makes applications and services accessible from anywhere in a secure manner, and this is where the power of it lies, as well as why adoption accelerated over the past year.
With SaaS, businesses that had to rapidly shift to a work from home scenario could easily obtain the services required, from file sharing to collaboration and more. Many organisations were forced to reconsider their cloud strategy and accelerate adoption to ensure business continuity. One thing to bear in mind, however, is that SaaS is the next step in the digital transformation journey, but it is not the final destination.
Moving the production environment into the cloud using SaaS and other ‘as a service' solutions will give benefits of increased flexibility and uptime, along with ease of management. However, if the backup server is still located on traditional on-premises hardware, the same risks that the production environment has evolved away from will be reintroduced. Basically, moving into the cloud without rethinking the backup strategy could compromise the ability of businesses to recover in the event of a disaster.
On-premises data backup and disaster recovery for cloud services do not make business sense. In a world where the majority of people are working remotely, the necessity to return to physical premises to recover from a data loss event is completely impractical. Data Management as a Service (DMaaS) aligns perfectly with SaaS, offering a hosted solution that evolves the backup environment along with production.
Digital transformation is a journey that requires continuous evaluation and adaption, especially given that most businesses will end up with some form of hybrid scenario before they move fully into the cloud. Data lies at the heart of it all, which makes it essential to have the right backup technology and partner at every stage. No matter where in the SaaS and cloud evolution a business is, having appropriate backup and disaster recovery is critical.
