What is Backup as a Service (BaaS)?

The shift towards the cloud has changed how organizations deploy and maintain their infrastructure. From the advent of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to the emergence of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), the “cloud as a Service” model has become an important part of modern digital strategies. As organizations continue to embrace the flexibility and scalability of these cloud-based solutions, there’s a growing need for a comprehensive data protection strategy.

This is where Backup as a Service (BaaS) comes into play. For example, a faulty software update, such as the one that impacted 8.5 million Windows devices in July 2024, can disrupt critical systems and services across various organizations. Customers might lose access to important data, and incident response capabilities can be severely impacted. Without a reliable backup system in place, recovering from this disruption could take days. In such situations, BaaS ensures that systems can be quickly restored and business can resume with minimal downtime. Read on to explore the benefits of BaaS, how it works, and the different types of BaaS available.

Summary

1. BaaS provides businesses with reliable and secure cloud-based data backup solutions,

2. BaaS offers numerous advantages, including reduced infrastructure and maintenance costs, scalability and flexibility to adjust backup resources as needed, improved data security and compliance, and improved data availability and disaster recovery.

3. DigitalOcean offers comprehensive backup solutions for Droplets, Volumes, and Managed Databases. These solutions feature automated, incremental backups, flexible retention policies, and the ability to scale as data needs change, ensuring data protection and business continuity.

What is BaaS?

BaaS is a cloud-based backup and data protection model that maintains the backup infrastructure on behalf of the customer. Unlike traditional backup methods that require significant on-premises infrastructure, BaaS uses cloud storage to ensure data is continuously backed up and easily recoverable.

Benefits of BaaS

BaaS offers numerous advantages that improve data protection, security, and business continuity. Here are some key benefits:

1. Reduced infrastructure and maintenance costs

BaaS eliminates the need for businesses to invest in and maintain their own on-premise backup infrastructure, such as servers, storage devices, and backup software. Instead, the cloud service provider takes care of all the hardware, software, and maintenance, allowing you to focus on your core operations. This results in significant cost savings and increases cloud ROI, as you only pay for the storage and backup services the application needs without the overhead of managing the underlying infrastructure.

2. Scalability and flexibility

BaaS solutions are designed to be highly scalable so that businesses can easily adjust their backup storage and bandwidth requirements as their data needs change. This is particularly beneficial for cloud-oriented applications, where data volumes fluctuate significantly. With BaaS, the application can scale its backup resources up or down as needed without investing in additional on-premise hardware or software.

3. Improved data security and compliance

BaaS providers offer strong security measures, such as data encryption, access controls, and regular security audits, to protect the backup data. This can be important for cloud-oriented applications that handle sensitive or regulated data, as it helps the application comply with industry standards and regulations.

4. Increased data availability and disaster recovery

BaaS solutions provide features like data redundancy, geographic distribution, and automatic failover, ensuring that backed-up data is readily available and can be quickly restored during a disaster, such as a hardware failure, data center outage, or natural disaster. This can be crucial for cloud-oriented applications, where data loss or downtime can significantly impact the business and its customers.

How does BaaS Work?

BaaS uses a cloud service provider’s cloud infrastructure and expertise to handle the entire backup and restoration process. The typical BaaS workflow involves the following steps:

Data backup: The BaaS process starts by securing a connection between the customer’s on-premise or cloud-based systems and the BaaS platform. The customer’s data is then regularly backed up to the cloud-based storage infrastructure maintained by the BaaS provider. BaaS supports the following modes of backup:

• Data storage and management: The BaaS provider stores the backed-up data in a secure cloud storage environment. Once the data is stored, the entire backed-up data undergoes scheduling, monitoring, and optimization.

• Data restoration: When customers need to restore data, they can access the BaaS platform and initiate the restoration process. The BaaS provider will then retrieve the relevant backup data from the cloud storage and securely deliver it back to the customer’s systems.

Different types of BaaS

Organizations can consider the various types of BaaS and choose the solution that best fits their specific data backup and recovery requirements.

Hybrid BaaS

Hybrid BaaS combines on-premise backup infrastructure with cloud-based storage and management. In this model, the backup data is initially stored on local hardware, such as network-attached storage (NAS) or backup appliances, and then automatically replicated to the cloud. This approach allows businesses to use their existing on-premise backup investments while benefiting from cloud-based backup’s scalability and reliability.

Consider an e-commerce platform that handles high volumes of transactions daily. This platform uses a hybrid BaaS solution to store recent orders and payment information on-premise for faster access and recovery. At the same time, older data, such as historical sales records, is replicated in the cloud for long-term storage and disaster recovery. This hybrid approach combines the speed and performance of local storage with the scalability and cost-effectiveness of cloud backup, ensuring both quick recovery times for current data and secure, scalable storage for archival data.

Managed BaaS

Managed BaaS is a model where the service provider takes full responsibility for the backup and recovery process, including selecting and managing backup hardware and software, data protection, and disaster recovery. This type of BaaS is particularly useful for organizations that lack the internal IT resources or expertise to manage a complex backup infrastructure.

For example, in the healthcare industry, a cloud-hosted Electronic Health Record (EHR) might maintain patient data that meets strict regulatory requirements like HIPAA. The managed BaaS provider is responsible for backing up the entire EHR infrastructure, including the cloud-based application and databases, with automated management, monitoring, and secure off-site data storage.

Take control of your data with DigitalOcean’s backup offerings

DigitalOcean offers backup solutions to help you safeguard your data and ensure business continuity. Let’s explore the backup options available with DigitalOcean:

• Droplets backups — Automatically created disk images of Droplets (scalable Linux virtual machines).

• Volume Snapshots create on-demand disk backups of your Volumes, allowing advanced data protection and the ability to quickly create new volumes from those backups to share across multiple Droplets.

• DigitalOcean Managed Databases backup provides free daily backups, ensuring your critical data is automatically backed up daily and can be restored to any point within the previous seven days.

You can experience up to 6.5x faster backups* through our new backup storage infrastructure that uses incremental backup technology to back up only changed data. Here’s the customer feedback on DigitalOcean backups:

Snapshooter — A unified, simple, fast, and flexible cloud backup solution that protects data across cloud workloads—Droplets, volumes, files, apps, and databases. With just a few clicks, SnapShooter can be integrated into DigitalOcean workflows that support self-hosted databases, file systems, S3-compatible object stores, containers, and custom backup options for managed containers.

Pricing — The DigitalOcean pricing model allows developers to tailor their backup implementation to their specific data protection needs and budget constraints:

Sign up today to experience the power of DigitalOcean’s backup solutions for data protection for your cloud applications and infrastructure.

*Actual backup speed gains and performance may vary depending on a variety of factors such as system configuration, I/O load, operating environment, and type of workloads.