The Evaluator Group Managed Backup-as-a-Service (BUaaS) Evaluation Guide is part of a series of Evaluation Guides designed to help investigate and evaluate storage technology options. These guides are for IT professionals seeking a neutral, objective discussion of the design considerations behind new products, technologies, and trends. Evaluator Group Evaluation Guides are developed based on our review of technology options and strategic analysis of how they can best be used in today’s information storage environments.
Instead of ranking product offerings, an exercise that ignores the uniqueness of each IT environment, Evaluator Group provides a wide range of data points from which to base a detailed evaluation. With this information, Evaluator Group recommends that IT professionals review their requirements, starting with this guide, as well as our team of experts to make selections.
Managed BUaaS Characteristics
Put simply, backup-as-a-service (BUaaS) refers to obtaining backup and recovery capabilities from a third-party service provider. In the case of managed backup-as-a-service, tasks and responsibilities such as deployment and management of infrastructure, and the set-up and running of data protection jobs are offloaded to that service provider. This differs from other, non-managed BUaaS offerings that are simply backup software hosted in the public cloud, and that still require the customer to handle these operations. But what they have in common is that customers pay for what they get as a subscription or consumption-based service.
Managed services, which vary by service provider, might include cloud-based resources, for example, cloud-hosted backup software or retention storage, with the managed service provider working in conjunction with the cloud service provider and adding value-add white glove services. However, they also have additional flexibility in terms of where the backup software itself is deployed, as well as in the configuration of the underlying, supporting infrastructure. The backup software might be deployed on the customer’s site, or it might be hosted offsite in a colocation data center.
Core backup and operational recovery functions are addressed with managed backup services. Some include replication, but this would typically fall more under disaster recovery services. Recovery points and recovery times are often covered as a “service level objective” (SLO) – that is to say, it is a “best effort” approach without remedial action if not met. Others have service level agreements (SLAs), in which remedial actions (typically a credit for service) are taken if the recovery points or times are not met. The uptime for the service itself is often covered as an SLA. Additional data lifecycle management capabilities, like archive, might be included – as well as other value-add capabilities, such as analytics and reporting for compliance and security.
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