Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings can provide small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with access to software remotely as a Web-based service. SaaS data protection provides online backup and recovery and can meet broader information-management requirements, such as archiving, compliance, search and disaster recovery. With SaaS-based data protection, SMBs can elevate current capabilities beyond backup and recovery, while reducing costs and administrative overhead. According to Enterprise Strategy Group, 86 percent of organizations use tape-based backups. While the portability of tape lets organizations fulfill disaster-recovery requirements, the inherent slowness of these backups and restores, as well as reliability issues, are validating the accelerated adoption of disk-based solutions and growing interest in SaaS-based alternatives.
Another reason to consider SaaS: increased pressure to retain data longer in accordance with corporate compliance or industry regulations. As information typically exists in different formats and different applications, determining the best way to provide access and respond to compliance requests can be daunting, due to hidden costs and administrative complications.
With SaaS-based data protection, companies have the potential to reduce or even eliminate hardware, software, tape media and offsite media shipping expenses. Another advantage is the ability to meet service-level guarantees while gaining the assurances of successful backups and timely, efficient file restores. Predictable pricing also is a plus, as fixed, monthly expenses are easier to budget than large, sometimes unforeseen expenditures.
Most MSPs possess an understanding of what is required to meet service-level agreements, as 24/7 monitoring and management is a core IT services offering. MSPs also typically provide appropriate bandwidth-throttling capabilities to lessen network impact during backup and recovery operations. They often specialize in supporting mission-critical databases and usually are knowledgeable about compliance and regulatory audits.
Online backup and recovery is the first step toward the delivery of multiple services, such as replication, deduplication, archiving, search and e-discovery. The key for SMBs...

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