Downtime is not an option for modern organizations that need to cope with the high expectations of their customers. To diminish the danger of downtime, more and more businesses are steering towards cloud and hoping for the best. The cloud brings many benefits, such as removing the complexity of maintaining an on-premises infrastructure, still, the customers are in charge to protect their data and enable business continuity.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss IaaS data protection solutions, the most effective way of protecting data and applications that reside in the public cloud. But why do you need to protect data that is already in the cloud? According to the Frost & Sullivan 2018 Cloud User Survey, one of the biggest concerns for businesses are backup and recovery of cloud workloads (61% of respondents).

Most cloud providers, including AWS, operate on the shared responsibility model, meaning that they ensure the availability of the infrastructure and its components: storage, networking, or database resources. In the same time, it’s business subscribers’ responsibility to look for their data and to configure OS or network security. In the event of an outage, the public cloud provider will restore customer’s instances, with their respective resources, but you might encounter downtime and the associated revenue loss if you don’t back up your applications and data.

How do you protect data that resides in the cloud?

Moving from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud brings a whole new mindset, from a rigid and time-consuming setup that is usually built around the worst-case load, to a flexible solution that is based on need and can be delivered on demand. This eliminates the number of wasted resources that would just sit idle and contributes to a large-scale digital transformation for any organization. The mindset shift also applies to data protection solutions.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) data protection platforms are able to protect data that’s already in the cloud and fulfill your part of the shared responsibility with your cloud provider. Advanced solutions allow the system administrators to schedule and set policies around what workloads or infrastructure resources get backed up, backup windows and how many copies of the backup should be retained. They also have the capacity to automate and orchestrate the process of making sound backups of your public cloud-based data, reducing the manual effort for your IT staff.

What are the benefits that IaaS data protection solutions offer?

Organizations will experience a plethora of advantages, using IaaS data protection solutions, including:

Effective disaster recovery (DR) — Cloud outages, cyber-attacks or human errors can be fatal for businesses and you should avoid being caught on the wrong foot. You can simply restore to a new cloud region using the backup created by your IaaS data protection service and continue to focus on your business operations.

— Cloud outages, cyber-attacks or human errors can be fatal for businesses and you should avoid being caught on the wrong foot. You can simply restore to a new cloud region using the backup created by your IaaS data protection service and continue to focus on your business operations. Costs optimization — Not all workloads are critical. By choosing the right levels of protection for each of them, you can better plan the costs for backup and recovery.

— Not all workloads are critical. By choosing the right levels of protection for each of them, you can better plan the costs for backup and recovery. Improved security — IaaS solutions are running entirely in the cloud environment and have no access to your data. This helps with better compliance and gives you complete control of the data.

Enterprises continue the mass adoption to the cloud to drive digital transformation, but all the efforts can be worthless if they experience downtime, security breaches or data loss. IaaS solutions offer a high level of data protection for cloud environments that automates the backup processes and makes IT admins’ lives easier.