WTL

Data Protection as a Service

Ensuring data is properly protected against loss or theft has to be a strategic priority. Maintaining a secure, up-to-date copy of your data is critical – to help restore operations quickly after a local disaster for instance. Data protection obligations (think GDPR) attach a significant financial penalty to permanently losing data, further emphasising the importance of recovery.

Configuring, managing and testing backup and recovery is a major undertaking – particularly as your data estate continues to grow. The modern hybrid operating environment simply adds to the complexity, creating more opportunities for misconfiguration.

Given its strategic importance, you will need to ensure adequate resources are assigned to disaster recovery-related tasks. But when IT departments are already stretched, diverting key people to what is a relatively routine operation could delay or derail other strategic projects.

One of the most effective ways to deal with the problem is to consider data protection as a service and outsource to a specialist.

Applying the cloud model to data protection

Cloud backups are now a routine aspect of both professional and consumer life – our smartphones automatically copy data to the cloud for instance. But in terms of data protection, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is arguably more important.

Under the DRaaS model, everything operates almost exactly the same as it always has with one key difference – your outsourcing partner shoulders responsibility for making sure everything works properly. Their expert consultants will configure the necessary cloud connections, create backup routines, automate common tasks, verify backup sets, and regularly test recovery routines.

Importantly, their expert consultants are also on hand to assist with recovery in a genuine disaster scenario, ensuring you can recover your data and resume operations as quickly as possible. As well as having the skills and expertise you need in an emergency, service level agreements ensure tasks are always completed in a timely fashion.

Does DRaaS deliver value for money?

Although DRaaS will often update and improve your backup and recovery capabilities, its true value lies in convenience. Your data is fully protected and recoverable, and your in-house team is free to participate in other projects and activities tied to your business’ strategic goals.

Having a DRaaS partner also allows your business to pursue increasingly flexible operating models to meet the changing demands of your customers and staff. They will perform the necessary platform reconfigurations to ensure data continues to be collected and stored safely off-site, for whenever it is required.

With the assistance of the cloud, advanced DRaaS providers are able to provide instant fail-overs during a data loss event. Rather than having to maintain a costly co-location data centre for such scenarios, fail-over switches operations to the cloud. This allows your business to maintain near-normal levels of service while the local data centre s being restored.

In these respects, DRaaS offers excellent value for money. With access to DR expertise and the ability to operate more flexibly without being constrained by current DR provisions, you reduce friction that normally slows growth.

To learn more about DRaaS and how WTL can help you meet your data protection obligations and save time and resources, please get in touch.

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