Baas & DRaaS : Which companies are your data backup solutions intended for?
We globally work with all companies since IT and information processing is now essential to their economic activity. We can see increasing awareness of the need to set up back-up, but also to have and test a business continuity plan. While companies in the financial sector are forced to do this by regulation, companies in all sectors and of all sizes are now also taking this step.
What is the difference between BaaS (Back-up as a Service) and DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service)?
The big difference between BaaS and DRaaS is the ability and granularity to restore data: the former can restore a file or an e-mail that has been inadvertently deleted, taking into account the history, whereas the latter has the ability to restore an entire system in a crisis situation (ransomware, fire, etc.) where the company's servers are completely unusable.
Back-up constitutes an essential and minimum first level for any company. Depending on its activity, its organisation and the regulatory framework, each company will be best served by specifically evaluating its own risks and addressing them. This is precisely one of the missions that our consultants regularly carry out. Doing so allows us to detect failures and IT weaknesses upstream and to direct the client towards our Back-up or DRaaS services, or both, even though some tools and software may be common to both processes.
Data back-up: what should companies be particularly careful about, especially when using cloud services?
More and more companies are now using Microsoft 365 cloud services such as OneDrive or Office, but they are often unaware that Microsoft does not provide a backup of their environment. While there is a real-time record of data, in the event of a major incident on the platform, their information will be permanently lost due to the lack of back-up copies. To remedy this, we have created a data back-up service, notably in the Microsoft cloud. EBRC keeps the copies in two separate Tier IV Data Centers for even greater security. We have also extended this service to data on Microsoft Azure and AWS (Amazon Web Services).
What does your DRaaS service involve?
Overall, our DRaaS offer allows us to synchronise and replicate a VMware client infrastructure at EBRC. Our services then have the most recent "picture" of the infrastructure and its data at their disposal. If needed, they can quickly recreate the client’s entire environment, servers and data, "on demand", from EBRC's IT services and resources. We also support other cloud environments. For customers using Veeam, EBRC creates back-up via its solution which allows easy replication from the customer's servers to our Data Centers, thus simplifying recovery with limited data loss and minimal disruption to users.
Finally, what would be the one piece of advice you would like to share with companies in order to secure their data?
The first recommendation would be to read IT or cloud service contracts carefully, especially for everything related to cloud back-up and/or to ask advice from professionals like EBRC. Many companies often discover the lack of protection too late, when the disaster already occurred. The second is not to hide the fact that data back-up and maintaining a business continuity plan are not cheap, but that the loss of data can be very costly and even fatal for a company.