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Scale on-demand and lower costs with public cloud backup, DR


Johannesburg, 11 May 2020
Duarte Guerra, solutions architect within Datacentrix’s enterprise business unit
Duarte Guerra, solutions architect within Datacentrix’s enterprise business unit

Recent research by Spiceworks states that online backup/recovery represents the second-largest budget allocation within cloud services across the US and Europe. Are South African companies expected to follow this trend that is driven by the current influx of data expansion? Yes, states Duarte Guerra, solutions architect within Datacentrix’s enterprise business unit, as local organisations are just as much on the lookout for faster, more efficient and reliable backup and recovery strategies as their global counterparts.

According to Gartner, with the rapid expansion of media volumes and data, "traditional approaches, such as tape backup, simply cannot keep up with today’s fast pace of information growth. Companies are looking for new and faster ways to protect their applications and backup, and secure their data. The public cloud has brought a new element to backup and disaster recovery, by providing fast recovery, cost efficiencies and a dependable way to ensure business continuity."

Forrester corroborates this statement, outlining that "exponential data growth, shrinking backup windows, static budgets and increasing deployments of next-generation, business-critical mobile, cloud and Web applications are changing backup and disaster recovery (DR) requirements" – with the result that they are being recognised as becoming increasingly strategic.

Says Guerra: “South African businesses are coming to the realisation that maintaining significant amounts of unreferenced data on primary all-flash tier one storage is expensive to sustain, and moving this data to sub-tier, or secondary storage, or tape, as aligned with a company’s backup and DR strategy, can be far more cost-effective.

“However, for compliance reasons, because many organisations are required to retain data for between five and 10 years, the risk run with a tape-only setup is that, as the physical tapes age, so too does the data. Unfortunately, this means that at some point it may not be possible to restore.

“By choosing to go a public cloud-based backup as a service (BaaS) route, companies are able to outsource the backup and DR requirements that these more traditional on-premises approaches are struggling to keep up with.”

Guerra states that deploying public cloud for backup and DR offers many benefits, with the aforementioned significant costs savings being top of the list. “The managed services approach of offloading areas that are not part of your core business to qualified service providers makes more sense, both financially and from a business management point of view. By outsourcing your backups and DR, you can shift a previously capital cost to an operational expense and it means that you’re also mitigating risk.

“Using a BaaS service allows companies to flexibly scale the services up and down as requirements change, so they pay only for services consumed. This is as opposed to a traditional backup environment, where they would need to raise capital expenditure to purchase infrastructure – which would also most likely be under-utilised.”

A BaaS set-up can also cut short the procurement process, which essentially takes between four to six weeks to scale out. “From a compliance point of view, it makes sense for South African companies to look for a BaaS service provider that is able to guarantee that all data will remain within the country’s borders, but is also able to offer a selection of geo-locations and multiple sites to store the data.

“Multiple data centres, designed and configured with multiple independent storage solutions, provide additional data availability, as data is replicated between the sites, thereby ensuring that there will be two copies of your data available at any point in time. Security is also a key consideration, so the end-to-end encryption of data, while it is in transit and at rest, is a must,” he adds.

Datacentrix is offering all new BaaS portal and contracted clients the first three months of this service free, available on new contracts until 30 June 2020. More information is available here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6663001695359942656

Clients can also enjoy a free, 30-day BaaS trial, providing three copies of data, across two different repositories, and one off-site backup to experience the benefits of the solution. For more information, visit https://backup.datacentrix.co.za/.

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