Jason Buffington .com

One of the most important things you can do to ensure data or cyber resilience is to get your data out of the building or cloud region – i.e., the production environment. Get your data out of the building because if you don’t have at least one survivable copy, then you don’t have a recovery plan … or frankly even of recovery hope.

“Get your data out of the building” were in fact the first words on the first page and the last words of the last page of my first book back in 2010. But there’s lots of clouds out there, so in another installment, I’ll talk about what you should look for in a cloud repository.

That said, the key distinguishing feature for BaaS and DRaaS is not where will the data live, but in who all is curating it. Every cloud provider has backroom engineers who are racking servers, fixing storage, and configuring networks. They do a great, though thankless, job. What distinguishes one BaaS or DRaaS provider from another is in the expertise (as-a-Service) that are you getting alongside those repositories.

If you’re using a generic hyperscale cloud, then you and your team still have to be the smartest kids in the room when planning your data or cyber resilience. But with BaaS and DRaaS managed service providers, you get on-demand experts in optimum backups and disaster/cyber preparedness and recovery.

On your worst day, when your data center is on fire, under water, or ransomed by a bad actor, wouldn’t it be nice to have experts in recovery who already have hands on access to your data? With level heads and years of experience to jump in beside you.

Even before that, when your backup job shows an error, wouldn’t it be nice to have somebody who’s always watching a dashboard and who sees that kind of error every day somewhere versus you’ve never seen it before and your best chance is either a knowledge base or a Google search?

Or how about somebody who can help you with best practices for planning your IT resilience architecture again by using methods that they practice and test every week …  versus your annual or less strategy session?

Regardless of which clouds you end up putting your data in … chances are you have either self-service or managed service options. Managed BaaS and DRaaS costs more, but the value of expertise as-a-service before, during, and after your worst IT day might be the difference between your organization surviving a crisis or you updating your resume.

Please leave your thoughts in the original Linkedin article.