At this stage, all kinds of enterprises are processing and using data in various forms. Protecting sensitive data in business data has become a top priority for enterprises to maintain healthy operations.
It is no secret that data breaches are becoming increasingly common, costing businesses billions of dollars in damages each year. However, not all businesses are able to afford the expensive price tag that comes with building a well-trained software and hardware security defense team.
Preventing data breaches and protecting customer privacy has always been a challenge for businesses. However, with the recent introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this challenge has become even more pressing. Under GDPR, businesses must take steps to ensure that the data they collect and the process is secure, and must also be able to demonstrate that they have done so. This has led to a need for new and innovative solutions to address these challenges, and one such solution is DPaaS.
Additionally, as more and more businesses move their traditional databases and services to the cloud, Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) has become a popular solution that can be tailored to fit the technology needs of any organization.
DPaaS is a cloud-based service that helps enterprises meet their data security needs while also providing data backup and recovery options. Users can obtain and use cloud-based DPaas services through a subscription model.
DPaaS provides a cost-effective and convenient way for enterprises to protect their data. It is also scalable, so enterprises can increase or decrease their use of the service as their needs change.
Why is DPaaS “Just Needed”?
In a data-driven business environment, companies often need to generate, process and analyze a large amount of data, and at the same time assist the business in making decisions on this basis. Due to the potentially valuable and fragile nature of the data produced, they typically face the following risks:
■Data loss due to cyberattacks, human error, IT failures, and natural disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic that is having a huge impact on businesses.
■Data privacy concerns as defined by governance, risk, and compliance requirements.
■The need for increased data storage and backup as data volumes grow exponentially.
As businesses move their systems and data to the cloud, responsibility for data security, backup, and recovery falls to the users, businesses, and cloud service providers. To prevent critical systems and data from becoming targets for malicious attackers, businesses need to DPaaS for easy maintenance and management.
DPaaS can realize on-demand, proportional and flexible expansion, as well as unified backup, storage and disaster recovery of data.
Main services involved in DPaaS
■Backup as a Service (BaaS), as commercial software, can upload key data through the Internet for easy retrieval and backup by businesses
■ Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), as a key IT service, enables user enterprises to back up their business systems and applications to the cloud in advance. In the event of an emergency, the service can quickly restore data to its pre-disaster state.
STaaS solutions differ from traditional cloud-based storage solutions, known as Backend as a Service (BaaS), in that they backup data from the cloud to local data storage systems. This allows organizations to keep a physical copy of their data at all times, ensuring that it is always available if needed. STaaS solutions are often used in conjunction with BaaS solutions, as they can provide an additional layer of protection for data.
A resilient DPaaS architecture typically provides integrated solutions that can span across storage, processing units, networks, geographies, and management for a reliable and scalable storage layer to protect data from hardware failures and software errors, as well as from mistakes that can lead to data loss through duplicate deletions, and ransomware attacks.
Nowadays, many online application services cannot withstand prolonged interruptions during operation. As a result, users often need to back up data in the cloud and on their local drives, while the restoration process is quick, modular, and can be restarted on demand. Flexible DPaaS services can automatically detect backup status and restart the corresponding service without interrupting other processes. At the same time, the DPaaS service system can also reasonably avoid downtime caused by software updates or error fixes.
When performing an online backup of data, network interruption is often the main reason for the failure of data backup. Therefore, the DPaaS architecture is designed to minimize the amount of data that needs to be transmitted by combining source data-based deduplication with modular restartable components, thereby mitigating risks.
In addition to network outages, hardware failures in the data center itself can affect the success of backups. Therefore, DPaaS no longer binds data backup processing to a single data center but spans multiple data centers and geographical locations when data is stored, so that in the event of a local disaster, the safe backup of data can be made sure.
When enterprises introduce DPaaS, they not only need to consider the advantages of technology but also need to consider cost and efficiency. When data is faced with possible disasters, enterprises need to weigh the effectiveness of DPaaS in providing services for cloud data security according to the actual deployment situation in advance. On this basis, enterprises can then choose a suitable package from the DPaaS subscription service at an affordable price.
At the same time, enterprises must also confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of their subscription services in advance, and then determine whether the DPaaS solution can meet the business backup strategy, and the RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of data recovery in the event of a disaster.
Surging DPaaS Demand
Due to the impact of COVID-19 on the way people work, more and more organizations are preparing to move their on-premises operations to the cloud. In the process of migration, an indispensable link is to use a powerful and reliable DPaaS model to achieve smooth data transfer and daily security protection measures.
As organizations increasingly look to outsource data protection and management, the global data protection as a service market is expected to see significant growth in the coming years.
As per the Market research firm, Allied Market Research the DPaaS market size was valued at $15.49 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $170.54 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 27.2% from 2021 to 2030. Meanwhile, another research firm, Transparency Market Research, predicts that the total market share of DPaaS will grow to $46 billion by 2024.
While forecasts vary by research firms, they all agree that substantial demand growth will drive the field to flourish. And many enterprises are already familiar with DPaaS and its related services.
Despite the strong demand for services, in order to avoid getting caught in the “red ocean, various DPaaS providers are working hard to differentiate their products and build a clear technical development roadmap. This is because, despite strong demand for their services, these providers are aware of the challenges of competing in a highly saturated market.
In addition, for small and medium-sized enterprises, with employees working from home becoming the “new normal”, they urgently need to protect data generated by employees from different regions through DPaaS technology, on the premise of a cost-effective subscription model.
Market-leading DPaaS providers;
Amazon Web Services:
As the largest cloud service provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is also a leading provider of DPaaS. Its Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides highly scalable, persistent storage that can be easily accessed and retrieved from any location on the Internet while protecting data. Users can easily get and retrieve data from this facility through its Web service interface.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise:
HP’s Data Protector provides a dynamic and adaptive data backup and recovery solution. Not only it is a cost-effective and reliable solution for backing up and recovering data but also provides a high degree of protection for your data.
Clumio:
As an all-cloud ecosystem, Clumio is known for its powerful SaaS data protection services. It not only manages complex cloud service-related issues but also creates value for customers by delivering the scalability of cloud services.
Veritas technology:
Veritas provides full coverage for leading SaaS applications, with advanced automation features and native integrations that make it easy to use and maintain. Veritas Backup Exec is the industry’s most comprehensive backup and recovery solution. The web-based user interface makes it simple to manage complex backup, recovery and replication programs. Veritas Protect delivers advanced data protection for data-at-rest, data-in-motion, and data-in-process for enterprise applications, databases, and cloud applications. Veritas Backup Exec 15 delivers high efficiency and data reuse while reducing backup windows, lowering the cost of backup, and enabling faster and easier restores and recoveries.
Commvault:
As the world’s leading provider of enterprise backup and recovery services, Commvault is committed to enhancing the user experience and assisting customers with their continued data preservation efforts. This DPaaS provider is extremely useful and effective in addressing common issues such as data loss, data SLA recovery delays, inefficient scalability, and data silos. According to a key capabilities assessment of backup and recovery by a leading authority, Commvault’s customer support and satisfaction rate are 98 percent based on the authority’s assessment of critical capabilities for backup and recovery.
For many enterprises across the world, business data has become the lifeblood of their operations. However, as companies struggle to navigate this digital transformation, protecting data has become a critical business priority.
In partnering with multiple cloud providers, DPaaS users benefit from a secure environment that minimizes risk and minimizes the hindrance of having to manage and maintain multiple platforms. With DPaaS, businesses can focus on their core mission, secure in the knowledge that their cloud environments have been taken care of.
