Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2022

may entail subscribing to it, configuring backup admins, and scheduling backup jobs.

more difficult or may not be an option. Or, if it is, production data may reside a storage array where the snapshots need to occur. BaaS solutions tuned for physical IT infrastructures offer agents to install on the OS that coordinate these backups. Some also interface with storage arrays to perform array-based snapshots. n Back up to local storage targets . Organizations may maintain a physical IT infrastructure due to the amount of production data they back up and store. BaaS solutions optimized for physical IT environments recognize, manage, and utilize different types of storage targets. These targets may include cloud storage, deduplicating backup appliances, disk storage arrays, and/or tape drives and libraries. n Offer on-site technical support . This may represent perhaps the biggest differentiator that separates BaaS offerings tuned for physical environments from others. Protecting a physical IT environment may require support staff to show up onsite to deploy the solution or perform repairs. These BaaS providers either have staff to perform these support services or they contract with third parties to perform them. BaaS solutions that protect physical IT environments can and do protect general-pur

few BaaS offerings that can effectively protect them. In a physical IT environment, each application server has its own dedicated hardware and operating system (OS). This requires a BaaS solution that can minimally interface with the server. The BaaS solution may also need to interface with the application hosted on the server and the server’s sup porting hardware. These very specific data protection requirements inher ently restrict the number of BaaS solutions available to protect physical IT infrastruc tures. Those that do protect physical IT environments ide ally offer the following fea tures: n On-premises deployment option for BaaS solution . Physical IT environments may have limited or no Internet connectivity which some BaaS solutions may require to perform backup. BaaS solutions tuned for physical IT environments offer physical and/or virtual appliances that get deployed when implemented.

pose cloud IT environments. However, these BaaS solutions may not work as well as those specifically tuned for general purpose cloud environments. If organizations run their workloads in general-purpose clouds, they should consider BaaS solutions specifically architected for them. Purpose-built for General purpose Clouds Organizations that already host their workloads in gen eral-purpose clouds should prioritize using BaaS solu tions purpose-built to pro tect them. General-purpose clouds include offerings such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and others. These platforms include technologies, such as auto scaling, identity, and access management (IAM), serverless compute, and object storage, among others. Purpose-built BaaS solutions capitalize on these technologies found in general-purpose clouds. Using these features, BaaS solu tions may dynamically scale to handle increased workloads with minimal intervention or planning. BaaS solutions purpose built for general-purposes clouds ideally include the fol lowing features to deliver a better backup experience: n Subscribe to it . When organizations use public clouds, they typically

n Ongoing maintenance . The vendor provides the ongoing maintenance of its BaaS hardware and software. This includes monitoring the BaaS for

faulty hardware, performing break/fix activities, and performing software fixes, patches, and updates as needed. However, its support does not extend to performing any activities that interact with and involve any of the organization’s data. For instance, the BaaS provider would not schedule organizational backups or perform recoveries except in a support role. Simply performing these three activities may free up the equivalent of a full-time employee, especially in enter prise organizations. BaaS solu tions also minimize many of the backup sizing activities that organizations go through when deploying a backup solu tion. Despite these similarities between available BaaS solu tions, their underlying archi tectural differences define which ones best meet specific organizational needs. These differences influence how well, or even if, a BaaS offer ing can perform backups and recoveries in certain IT envi ronments. Tuned for the Physical Organizations that run a physical IT infrastructure in any capacity will find only a

n Offers backup agents . Many BaaS solutions

capitalize on hypervisor and cloud OSes that offer snapshot APIs for the virtual machines (VMs) they host. BaaS solutions use these APIs to first create a VM snapshot and then back it up. This minimizes interaction with the VM’s guest OS. In physical environments, performing snapshots becomes

subscribe to services that cloud providers offer such as compute, storage,

16 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | WINTER 2022