The Be the Hero series is designed for Veeam partners to learn about Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), the Veeam Platform, and how partners can deliver the business outcomes customers need today.
This post is the first part of a four-part series, so please stay tuned to the Veeam blog:
- The Veeamazing BaaS and DRaaS
- Win the Battle of the 3-2-1 Rule With Off-site Backup
- DRaaS: The Offense to Shield Your Customers From Threats
- Veeam-powered BaaS & DRaaS and Partner-to-Partner Opportunities
Every notable superhero has an origin story. Veeam-powered BaaS and DRaaS partners are no different.
In an office building on Main Street, the IT administrator for Acme Inc. was managing her backups. She knew it was an extremely important task to ensure their data survives the unexpected. She did her best with the time and resources available, while trying to meet the business’ needs.
One day, the on-site server died. The backups successfully restored some of the data, but not all. The gold standard of backup, the 3-2-1 Rule, is an aspiration that someday she might achieve. If only there was a better way…
Enter the Veeam Platform and service providers.
Why BaaS and DRaaS?
Backup as a Service (BaaS) has many benefits. In a recent survey to current and potential BaaS & DRaaS users, the top reasons for pursuing a BaaS solution over traditional backup software and hardware are data accessibility and economics. The top two most important reasons (in order), regardless of organization size (SMB to Enterprise), are:
- Flexible payment options — moving from capital expenditures (CAPEX) to operational expenditures (OPEX)
- The ability to access backups from anywhere/anytime
The story for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is similar. The top two most important reasons organizations are leveraging DRaaS instead of managing their own secondary data center is cost efficiency, resource sharing and freeing up internal IT resources.
Data survivability is the main goal behind these solutions. As the threat landscape continues, how people work evolves (remote working and remote office/branch office locations), and data sprawl inevitably happens (stored in on-premises infrastructures, a public cloud, SaaS applications and private clouds), the economics of BaaS and DRaaS makes it compelling to include data protection strategies for companies of any size.
What is BaaS and DRaaS exactly?
Often mentioned together, BaaS and DRaaS are not the same solutions. Both are, however, part of a comprehensive data protection strategy. Backup as a Service can mean a few things depending on who you ask (Veeam verified this in its Data Protection-as-a-Service 2021 Report). It can be backup software that runs from the cloud without on-site hardware, on-site backup software/servers that are deployed and managed by IT or third-party staff or paid for as a subscription instead of a traditional software purchase. These descriptions of BaaS are all correct.
DRaaS is hosting a replication of your environment off site by a third party with the ability to failover and failback. This is a highly specialized task that was previously only available to large enterprises. With the “as a service” offering, disaster recovery is accessible to businesses and budgets of all sizes.
BaaS is typically offered by a service provider and occasionally the backup software companies themselves. DRaaS is highly specialized, requiring immediate attention day or night should a virtual machine or site go offline unexpectedly. DRaaS requires effective backups plus expertise to know which resources and applications to bring online first in the secondary data center, saving any changes in data during the failover period, and failing back to the main production site once restored plus any data changes.
Veeam-powered BaaS & DRaaS
Veeam’s approach to BaaS and DRaaS relies on our service provider partners to deliver best-in-class Backup and Disaster Recovery as a Service to customers. Veeam does not provide these services to end users, eliminating any partner concerns of competition. We support our partners’ business with powerful technology and go-to-market resources so they can be the hero to their customers.
Veeam focuses on the business outcomes that customers need when considering their data protection strategy and ensures service providers are in the picture. Veeam-powered BaaS & DRaaS is centered around off-site Backup and DRaaS workloads. Veeam Cloud Connect is a powerful tool (some might say our superpower) and feature of Veeam Backup & Replication that make BaaS and DRaaS possible.
Off-site backup
Off-site backup solutions make the “1” of the 3-2-1 Rule a reality. Companies need to make sure that a copy of their data is stored off site in case something happens to the on-site copy. Here’s where you get to save the day with Veeam Cloud Connect. For customers, Veeam Cloud Connect is a feature included with Veeam Backup & Replication at no additional charge. The customer activates Veeam Cloud Connect, finds their favorite service provider, and starts sending their backup jobs to the off–site repository. For service providers, Veeam Cloud Connect Backup unlocks the ability to create a multi-tenant cloud backup environment whether using your private data center and/or public cloud object storage as the backup repository. This multi-tenant capability is part of the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program in a pay-as-you-grow licensing model.
DRaaS
Offering DRaaS in a secure multi-tenant environment for your customers is possible with Veeam Cloud Connect Replication. With support for VMware Cloud Director, you can failover specific VMs or an entire site with streamlined failback with minimal disruption to users. With Veeam Cloud Connect Replication combined with Veeam Service Provider Console, a free tool for service providers, you can scale your services, remotely monitor and manage backups and replicas as well as automate usage reporting in one location.
Stay tuned for our future articles in the Be the Hero series where we take a deep dive on each use case, the partner-to-partner opportunity and how to become part of the VCSP partner universe with a BaaS and DRaaS competency. To continue your learning journey, here are some resources to get you started: