Data Protection as a Service – Who is it For?

As the needs of businesses continue to evolve and advance, so does the level of services needed to ensure they function properly in today’s technology-driven world. With the increased development and adoption of cloud services, many organisations are doing their best to keep up.

This is where data protection services can come in handy. In essence, data protection services (DPaaS) are created to ensure organisations are able to comply with the standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. Nowadays, data security and cloud storage companies are creating Data Protection-as-a-Service models.

Data Protection-as-a-Service in a Nutshell

Data Protection-as-a-Service plays a significant role in business nowadays. Come to think of it, most companies now use data in various forms so protecting data has become a top priority. Unfortunately, not all organisations can afford to invest in a resourceful and skilled IT team. 

This is where DPaaS can come in handy. Typically, Data Protection-as-a-Service is offered as a cloud-based service that’s designed to meet the data security and protection requirements of the organisation while integrating options for resilient recovery and backup. 

The Importance of DPaaS

A data-driven world generates a massive volume of data that needs to be analysed, processed, and used to help drive business decisions. However, data is vulnerable and can require elaborate protection. Other risks include:

• Data loss that is caused by human error, natural disasters, IT failures, cybercrimes, etc. 
• Governance, risk management, and compliance requirements (this includes data privacy considerations).
• Rapidly increasing backup and storage demands amidst the fast-expanding volume of data.

Transitioning to the cloud also entails responsibilities for data security, recovery, and backup are shared between the two parties, the cloud provider and the organisation. Critical services that are previously handled by systems, teams, and infrastructure on site are now shifted to the cloud provider.

However, cloud providers will not be responsible when someone in the organisation commits a mistake or is targeted specifically by malicious actors. Fortunately, Data Protection-as-a-Service offers ease of management and maintenance and acquisition. DPaaS also makes it easy to enable scaling up and down of services as needed.

By encompassing storage backup, and disaster recovery, Data Protection-as-a-Service makes it possible to have a unified approach to data protection. Data Protection-as-a-Service has three primary services:

• Backup-as-as-Service (BaaS) – BaaS is offered as a business software that handles the uploading of critical data through the internet. The facility will also make it possible for organisations to retrieve data securely and efficiently.
• Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) – Considered one of the most crucial IT services, DRaaS makes it possible for organisations to move their applications and systems to the cloud. In the event of an emergency, the service will make it possible for data to be restored to its pre-crisis state.
• Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) – The StaaS facility serves as a back up to the on-premises data storage system. This makes it possible for the organisation to retain a physical copy of their data at all times.

A robust DPaas architecture should provide a unified solution across processing, networking, storage, management, and geography. This starts with establishing a scalable and reliable storage layer that protects data from hardware error and data loss from ransomware attacks and deduplication errors.

In addition, since many organisations can’t afford extended overtime, the recovery and backup process should be modular, quick, and restartable. A resilient service should also be able to auto-detect failed backups and restart, without interrupting the other processes.