HONG KONG – Enterprises know they need to backup. Time is money, and business data is the product of countless hours of labor and intelligence. Precious company goodwill, resources, productivity, and competitiveness can be lost due to accidentally or maliciously corrupted or deleted data, or data and applications made unavailable due to hardware disasters or criminal hostage by ransomware. Certain types of data are even irreplaceable. According to the National Cyber Security Alliance , cyberattacks caused 69% of small organizations to be forced offline for a while and 37% experienced financial loss. In 2019, cybercrime forced 10% of small businesses to shut down.
Yet, diligently backing up organizational data can be complicated, time-consuming, and expensive. Many organizations only attempt to regularly back up the minimum assets, such as a few critical servers and workstations. The remaining data and applications, including work-in-progress documents, are left vulnerable to risks. Having data properly backed up offsite, as it should be, makes all this even more complicated.
Key Criteria in Choosing a BaaS Provider
Offered by an outside service provider, Backup-as-a-Service, or BaaS, addresses the complexity and overhead of traditional enterprise backup methods. As a virtualized cloud service, it is naturally offsite and managed by the provider. It requires no on-premises hardware, and can be fully automated. BaaS transparently handles all backup tasks in realtime, without relying on the effort or diligence of in-house human operators. There are no tapes or disks to manually rotate or keep track of, and it can be as specific or general as the enterprise desires, protecting several servers or the entire organization. In case of data issues, BaaS can offer easy and rapid data restoration so the company can quickly resume operations and get back to work. This highly convenient, cost-effective, and secure solution frees up staff so they can focus on more productive tasks, without compromising data and applications integrity.
When choosing a BaaS provider, several key criteria should be kept in mind:
- Compatibility – As a start, check whether the backup service supports your particular choices of operating systems and applications.
- Compliance – Consider whether your industry has compliance issues that impact usage of BaaS, and whether your organization can create policies to accommodate those compliance requirements.
- Security – Ask what security measures the service provider offers to protect your digital assets.
- Manageability – Check whether you can easily configure the service through a user-friendly portal, or do you need to call the technical support line to make adjustments and check on the status of your backups?
- Cost-effectiveness – Research and compare pricing among different BaaS vendors. The least expensive might not necessarily be the best value, if the BaaS is not reliable or cannot fully ensure your business continuity.
You should also consider other aspects of your IT infrastructure that can impact the performance and success of BaaS usage. Do you have sufficient bandwidth to support the realtime traffic to the BaaS provider’s offsite facilities, and does the bandwidth allow you to restore data in a quick enough manner? If not, check whether the service provider offers connectivity solutions alongside the BaaS, which can scale in realtime according to your needs, with high performance catering to the geographic locations you operate in.
Success with Managed Services
Indeed, aside from the technical aspects of the BaaS provider, you also need to consider whether the service provider offers a range of other relevant managed services. These services should at minimum include 7×24 customer support, and also give you confidence about the reliability of the underlying platform operating the BaaS solution. Professional consultation with certified experts is also a high priority for successfully helping you evaluate and design a reliable architecture that delivers the backup and disaster recovery functionality for your business needs.
Because you are planning for business success, you need to consider your future requirements for expanding into other markets around the world. A BaaS service provider with extensive points of presence and experienced local support will be instrumental to achieving your roadmap milestones. Although BaaS is cloud-based and should work from anywhere in the world, it is important your enterprise staff can contact knowledgeable professionals for inquiries and support. Ideally, your BaaS provider will have offices local to your own business points of presence, and competently support your team members in their own native languages.
Listed in Gartner’s Market Guide for BaaS – CITIC Telecom CPC
When researching the most appropriate BaaS solution provider for your enterprise needs, be sure not to overlook CITIC Telecom CPC, listed in Gartner’s Market Guide for Backup as a Service (May 2020) as one of the key BaaS hosters in China, the Middle East & Africa, Japan, and the rest of APAC. CITIC Telecom CPC’s SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR gives enterprises a full range of managed backup, replication and recovery services. It was created based on all the considerations discussed above, and provides operation modes that include onsite, offsite, and a variety of physical and virtual replication models. To speed up deployment, SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR supports “initial seed” transfers of your enterprise data to significantly reduce time and bandwidth needed for the initial full backup, and gives you the flexibility to have copies of your enterprise backup stored both in the cloud datacenter and locally on your premises for quick recovery if possible. SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR protects your sensitive data using encryption for both data-in-transit and data-at-rest giving your backup the most comprehensive data protection.
CITIC Telecom CPC also provides a user-friendly online management portal called ManagedCONNECT where your enterprise backup status and usage information can be easily accessed. ManagedCONNECT also provides visibility and configurability for other CITIC Telecom CPC flagship solutions your enterprise might choose to interoperate with SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR, including the SmartCLOUD(TM) cloud computing platform itself, TrustCSI(TM) comprehensive network security and enterprise protection (covering a wide range of modern threats including ransomware detection), TrueCONNECT(TM) carrier-class global and regional networking, and much more.
Similar to other BaaS solutions, SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR is offered on a subscription basis, with pricing based on the backup type. For example, backing up your enterprise’s physical servers, virtual machines (such as VMware and Hyper-V instances), and Microsoft Office 365 installations. The subscription pricing will also vary depending on your cloud storage and bandwidth requirements.
Act Today to Protect Your Data and Your Future
To help customers with inquiries and technical support for SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR and other solutions, CITIC Telecom CPC’s 24×7 professionals are always on hand, even offering native language support via the company’s many points of presence around the world. In fact, CITIC Telecom CPC is staffed by over 1,000 business and technology professionals with deep experience in their areas of expertise, including extensive IT industry certifications and vertical industry experience, all working at more than 140 points of worldwide presence, 18 cloud service centers, 30+ data centers, and two dedicated 24×7 Security Operations Centers.
Whether your organization ultimately decides to use CITIC Telecom CPC’s SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR or another vendor’s BaaS solution, it is imperative this decision is made sooner rather than later. Every second your mission critical digital data is not properly backed up, it is exposed to countless vulnerabilities, including those catastrophic enough to cease business operations. To make sure your company stays competitive and maintains its forward momentum, protect its achievements by backing up with the right BaaS.
To enjoy hassle-free and flexible managed cloud backup services, simply scan the QR code and register for the latest SmartCLOUD(TM) BRR offers with FREE restoration test!
