What is Backup as a Service? (BaaS) Definition + Benefits

What is Backup as a Service? (BaaS)

Backup as a Service (BaaS) is a cloud-based service that performs secure backups of your company's data without the costs and complexities of traditional self-managed backup solutions.

HYCU is a backup as a service provider that manages the end to end data backup process — including data storage, automated backup scheduling, and data recovery using its cloud infrastructure and resources.

With Backup as a Service, organizations are able to simplify their approach to cloud data protection. This guide will explain how IT leaders can protect their hybrid cloud infrastructure with a secure, scalable, cloud-native backup and recovery solution.

How does Backup as a Service work?

• Data Selection: Organizations are able to customize their online backups according to the data they want to back up. Examples include SaaS applications, VMs, databases, and mailboxes.

• Initialization Backup: The initial backup, also known as a full backup — is where the initial data transfer to the BaaS provider's cloud infrastructure takes place.

• Incremental Backups: After the initial backup, BaaS providers perform subsequent backups as needed. These are known as incremental backups, which is the data that has changed or been added since the last backup copies have been stored in the cloud.

• Automated Scheduling: Backup schedules can be configured to run automatically at specific intervals, such as daily, weekly, or hourly — it really all depends on the organization’s data optimization strategy.  

• Data Encryption: Data is typically encrypted during transmission and storage to ensure its security. BaaS providers use encryption protocols to protect data both in transit (during backup) and at rest (while stored in the cloud).

• Monitoring and Visibility: BaaS solutions include management consoles or dashboards that allow administrators to monitor the status of their backups, review logs, and configure backup settings.

• Data Recovery: In the event of data loss, corruption, or accidental deletion — administrators can initiate the data recovery process.

• Set Your Retention Policies: BaaS providers typically offer options for defining data retention policies. Organizations can specify how long backups should be kept in the cloud before they are automatically deleted or archived.

• Redundancy and High Availability: BaaS providers can implement redundancy and high availability measures to ensure data reliability. An example would be storing data in multiple geographic locations to guard against data center failures.

💡 Related: 10 Best Backup as a Service (BaaS) Providers & Solutions

What are the benefits of Backup as a Service?

Backup services are crucial for protection against accidental data deletion or ransomware attacks, which could expose your organization to data loss and other types of reputation damage.

The right Backup as a Service provider makes all the difference in the world.

Here are some of the benefits that result from partnering with HYCU for your backup and recovery needs:

• Data security: Your data is your most valuable asset, and securing it against threats such as ransomware is crucial. HYCU gives you peace of mind knowing your data is secure, protected, and rapidly recoverable from ransomware-free copies when you need it the most.

• Storage flexibility: Organizations often need the flexibility to choose specific cloud storage to align with business objectives and goals. HYCU accommodates this flexibility with a true 'bring your own storage' offering - allowing you to be in control of where your backup copies are stored.

• Cost savings: BaaS solutions are the most cost-effective means of keeping your data safe. Building your own solution would require capital expenditure and hiring specialized employees. Between the hardware, server maintenance, and IT labor needed to run a regular data backup service, costs add up quickly. HYCU is less expensive, with stable subscription costs, and no hardware or software requirements, resulting in a lower TCO.

• Scale with ease: Backup as a Service can scale up or down effortlessly to match your company’s data protection requirements. HYCU ensures backup and rapid recovery of business-critical data no matter how much your business grows. There is never a need to manually add hardware or procure new services to ensure your data is protected.

• Industry-leading customer support: When problems arise, you’ll have assistance available on request. Your provider’s customer service agents are only an email away. HYCU prides itself on industry-leading customer support, ensuring our customers can protect and recover their data with minimal disruptions.

• Simplicity: Backup as a Service can take care of all your backup and recovery needs with less time and effort needed. It eliminates data silos and the need to manage on-premises data centers. The simplicity of HYCU is seen with a single user interface combined with a streamlined user experience. This saves you from the headache of learning and managing numerous user interfaces for the protection of different cloud workloads.

• Easier to manage: BaaS is often easier to manage than a typical on-premises solution. Unlike on-premises solutions that require the installation. management, and operation of cumbersome physical data centers, BaaS allows you to simply connect to the cloud and use managed cloud services. HYCU ensures you have a true SaaS experience, making data protection and recovery as easiest as possible.

What are the key use cases and service offerings of BaaS?

HYCU has developed innovations such as R-Cloud, the world’s first data protection development platform. R-Cloud is designed for SaaS companies to offer backup and recovery services to their users.

No matter your use case, HYCU can help implement it for your business:

• Ransomware protection: Ransomware attacks are becoming ubiquitous. In February 2023, there were 240 known attacks, an increase of 45% from the record high the previous month. In the event of a ransomware attack, your data is safe and can quickly be restored from a known good copy. You won’t have to worry about making a ransomware payment because your company will not be required to meet the demands of a rogue hacker.

• Backup and recovery: Comprehensively protect your entire data estate without the high costs and complexity. 1-click simplicity for backup and recovery of your business-critical cloud-native workloads, including DPaaS, PaaS, and SaaS apps, ensuring business continuity.

• Disaster recovery: No matter what disruptions happen, your data is always readily available. In the event of a disaster, you can rest assured knowing that you can rapidly recover your business-critical data, restoring vital business systems.

• Data migration and mobility: When business needs or goals change, move your data anywhere, at anytime to the public cloud of your choice.

• Security and compliance: Store your data with peace of mind knowing that you’re in compliance with regulations. Security and privacy are key aspects of your BaaS plan. Your data will be safely stored in a cloud data center, and only those specifically approved will have access to your data.

• SaaS protection: SaaS providers can protect their customers' data and reduce downtime by partnering with a BaaS provider. Their on-demand services can then maintain business continuity even if their own servers are down.

💡 Related: Top 14 SaaS Backup Solutions & Tools for SaaS Data Protection‍

Backup as a Service Pricing Model and Costs

The pricing for backup services depends on a number of factors.

• Which cloud services are you using for backup?

• How much data do you need to store?

• Which backup frequency do you want?

• What extra features and customized plans do you require?

Consider the Damage of Data Loss

When businesses start considering BaaS, one of their first questions is about cost. While BaaS expenses vary depending on your service provider, it's often effective to think about the cost of not backing up your data instead. You can view backup as a service as a worthwhile investment against malicious attacks, and how the investment of protecting your data far outweighs potential data breaches and other types of critical data loss.

If your company has no backup solution, you could lose all your data to cyberattacks or other accidents. Retrieving lost data without a backup solution could cause extended periods of downtime and lost revenue. In the event of a disaster, routine business procedures might be unable to continue.

Without BaaS, you could face expenses due to situations like these.

• Ransomware fees: In the worst-case scenario of a ransomware attack, attackers could force you to pay exorbitant ransom fees. Cyber attackers often demand millions of dollars for lost data. If your business cannot pay the demands, you could lose all your company data. Or, if you pay the attacker, you sacrifice valuable revenue. BaaS helps prevent emerging cyber threats by securely locking data. In the event of a breach, backup as a service allows you to retrieve files quickly, with minimal downtime.

• Human errors: All businesses employ a wide range of employees with varying technological capabilities. Natural human error happens all the time, whether from a lack of training, misunderstood instructions or hardware malfunctions. These mistakes can be costly. If an employee accidentally loses data and you have no backup in place, you might never manage to retrieve it. With BaaS, you could have backed up the data and still accessed it, even after a similar mistake.

• Data corruption: Data corruption refers to any changes that occur to data during storage or processing. Corrupted files might become unusable or inaccessible to business officials. Whether data corruption results from human error, software failure, or other reasons, it can be challenging to retrieve the lost data. With backup as a service, you would still have access to the original file format and not have to pay retrieval fees.

How Does HYCU Help with Data Protection?

HYCU is a data protection and backup solution designed to help organizations safeguard their data and ensure data availability.

HYCU provides several features and benefits to assist with data protection:

1. Efficient Backup and Recovery: HYCU offers a true BaaS experience, providing streamlined backup and recovery without the inherent complexities of traditional data protection. Organizations can create backups of their SaaS data quickly and easily with zero learning curve. This ensures that critical data can be restored promptly to avoid data loss.
2. Application-Aware Backups: HYCU is designed to be application-aware, understanding the specific requirements and dependencies of various SaaS applications. Being application-aware is crucial in creating consistent and reliable backups of applications within virtual machines and cloud-based services.
3. Automated Backup Policies: HYCU allows organizations to define automated backup policies based on their specific needs. You can schedule regular backups without manual intervention, ensuring data protection is a continuous process.
4. Public Cloud Integration: HYCU is built in the Public Cloud, making it optimal for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. HYCU can back up critical SaaS data within the major public cloud platforms AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud without any dependencies on risk-averse agents, plugins, or appliances.
5. Granular Restores: Restore only what you need, when you need it. Accelerate recovery with granular level restores of business-critical SaaS apps.
6. Disaster Recovery Planning: HYCU can assist with disaster recovery planning by providing tools and features to replicate data to secondary locations or cloud environments. This ensures that data remains accessible even in the event of a site-wide disaster.
7. Monitoring and Reporting: HYCU typically offers built-in monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing administrators to keep an eye on the health and performance of their backup and recovery processes. This helps in identifying issues and optimizing data protection strategies.
8. Ransomware Protection: S3 compatible object lock ensures backups are immutable and ransomware-free. Quickly recover data from a known good point in time before the ransomware attack occurred.
9. Scalability: HYCU is designed to scale with the needs of the organization. As data grows, the solution can adapt to accommodate larger volumes of data and more complex backup and recovery requirements.

The Value of HYCU is Unmatched

Discover how HYCU’s Backup as a Service helps solve common cloud backup and recovery headaches while delivering immediate value to your organization, including:

• Unified backup and recovery: Backup, migrate, and failover your cloud and on-premises workloads from a single user interface anyone can use. ‍

• Resiliency on autopilot: Take advantage of automated application discovery to ensure everything in your agile IT environment is protected in the moment. ‍

• Ransomware ready: Protect your entire IT environment with air-gapped and immutable backups to cost-efficient cloud storage and take recovery time down from days to minutes. ‍

• Built for the cloud: Say goodbye to frustrating sizing exercises with a solution that dynamically scales alongside your evolving environments. ‍

HYCU: Make The Right Choice

• HYCU is a global leader in backup service solutions. Our backup as a service system, HYCU, can help your company data stay protected.

• HYCU is the only BaaS provider whose platform works seamlessly across your business’ multi-cloud or hybrid environment, delivering flexible, protected, and surprisingly simple data backups.

• You'll also decide where your data is hosted. Confidential data will be privately hosted, and the rest will be publicly hosted for easy accessibility by your team.

• To get started with HYCU, request a demo of HYCU

Backup as a Service: FAQs

Do organizations really need Backup as a Service?

The problem is that legacy backup and recovery solutions haven’t kept pace with modern hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Relying on native cloud platform capabilities, like snapshots, can quickly become costly and unmanageable. Using a Backup as a Service solution will resolve these issues by automating the data backup process while reducing risk of accidental data deletion and other types of costly mistakes.

💡 Related: Top 8 Small Business Backup Solutions (Cloud & On-Premises)

How often should a data backup be performed?

Data backup can be performed at any interval you specify in your backup strategy. The backup will happen automatically every time the specified amount of time has passed since the last backup. Your interval between backups should be short in order to limit potential data loss. The longer you go without backing up your data, the more data you stand to lose if something goes wrong.

Determining the amount of time for your company depends on your Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RPO is the maximum amount of time your company can tolerate data loss. If your RPO is set to 24 hours, then you will lose no more than 24 hours of data in the case of a disaster.

💡 Related: Data Risk Mitigation: How To Keep Your Organization’s Data Safe‍

How do BaaS providers back up on-premises applications and data to the cloud?

Backing up your on-premises applications and data takes some time initially, but this can be managed seamlessly by your provider. Your BaaS provider will connect your on-premises applications and data to the appropriate cloud storage servers. The data is then uploaded to the cloud and stored on secure servers.

Once you’ve signed up, you decide your "backup policy," which is the frequency and type of backup that will be performed for your data. You can choose a predefined policy of 6, 12, or 24 hours or create your own customized backup policy that suits your company. Once your policy is in place, your data will be backed up within the specified timeframe. During the backup process, your data will be seamlessly and automatically uploaded to the cloud.

How does a backup solution prevent enterprise data loss?

A robust Backup as a Service solution will prevent almost all enterprise data loss. Your data will be securely stored in the cloud. No matter what happens to the on-premises hardware and software you’re using, your cloud backup will offer a restore point to recover any data you lose.

When disaster strikes, your data can be recovered immediately. With minimal effort, you can restore your backup to your servers. You won’t lose any data because it is stored safely in the cloud and not dependent on your local hard drive storage.

What is Ransomware?

Ransomware is malicious software that can lock or harm your files.‍

Then, criminals will hold your data hostage until you agree to pay a “ransom” for its release.

Ransomware attackers use many tactics to access your data, from phishing emails with fraudulent links to stealing login information.

Fortunately, solutions like backup as a service can help prevent lost data from cyberattacks commonly deployed by hackers. No one knows if or when an attacker could strike, so it's crucial to have a backup plan for your data.

BaaS secures your data with encryption and immutable backups. In an attack, BaaS shortens recovery time. You can access your files and begin the restoration process more quickly. Many BaaS service providers can also assist you during a cyberattack, guiding you through the necessary next steps.

So, while ransomware threats are still pressing, solutions like BaaS can protect you from the full extent of the damage.

💡 Related: How To Protect Against Ransomware Threats

How does a BaaS solution help protect against ransomware attacks?

With ransomware attacks, a criminal organization tries to extort your company using malware. They can lock up all your data and refuse to give you the encryption key until payment is made. That’s the “ransom” they are seeking. Even if you give in to their demands and pay the ransom, you may not get your data back.

They don’t hold all the cards if you invest in a robust BaaS solution. With BaaS, your data can be restored quickly, and critical infrastructure will be returned to your network. You won’t even need to consider paying the ransom. Your company will be back up and running without ever paying a dime to the attackers.

How does a backup service provider help with disaster recovery?

In the event of a disaster, your data will be reliably available from the cloud, allowing you to rapidly recover your business-critical systems to minimize downtime.

Additional BaaS Resources

• Implementing Backup as a Service into Your Hybrid Cloud Data Strategy
• Multi-cloud Backup and Recovery: Nine Ways to Get it Right
• Future-proofing Your Backup and Recovery Strategy
• 5 Reasons You Need Cloud-Native Backup for Google Cloud
• The Importance of Data Protection When Selecting Cloud Providers
• HYCU Backup as a Service for Google Cloud
• Simplifying Multi-Cloud Data Protection, Data Migration, and Disaster Recovery
• Data Protection Strategies for Google Cloud Platform with HYCU
• The Dos and Don’ts of Hybrid Cloud Backup
• Avoiding the Top 7 Mistakes with Cloud Backups
• HYCU R-Cloud: A Multi-Cloud Data Protection Solution
• 6 Questions to Ask About Any Backup as a Service
• HYCU For Azure: Purpose-Built Data Protection, Data Migration and Disaster Recovery
• HYCU for AWS
• HYCU Backup as a Service for Google Cloud
• Three Ways to Improve Your Ransomware Readiness
• 5 Steps Every IT Professional Should Take to Prepare for a Ransomware Attack
• Are You Really Ready to Recover From a Ransomware Attack?