BaaS becomes crucial as cyber criminals target backups

Gareth Clements, Senior Territory Manager at Veeam Africa, and Driaan Odendaal, Senior Systems Engineer at Veeam Africa.

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Advanced, immutable backup solutions have become crucial for business resilience as cyber criminals increasingly target backups. However, managing backups efficiently requires resources and drives up the cost of business. This is why growing numbers of organisations are turning to backup as a service (BaaS) to secure their data and support business resilience.

This is according to backup and disaster recovery leader Veeam, which hosted a webinar on BaaS in partnership with ITWeb this week.

Gareth Clements, Senior Territory Manager at Veeam Africa, said: “BaaS and disaster recovery as a service provide the critical support and protection organisations need to stop focusing on maintenance and focus on innovation and growth.

“In the past, backups were seen as a grudge purchase, like insurance. However, in recent years, threat actors are going after the backups because they know these are your last line of defence. With the rapid rise of cyber threats, backups have become a critical pillar of business continuity, and are at the heart of an effective cyber security strategy,” he said.

He noted that backup repositories are targeted in 96% of ransomware attacks, and that cyber attackers often target Microsoft 365 due to its widespread deployment. “Eighty percent of these attacks target Microsoft Office applications,” he said.

Entra ID alone is targeted over 600 million times a day. In addition to cyber attacks, data is put at risk by human errors such as misconfiguration, deletion and outages, he said.

“Organisations realise that traditional cyber security alone is no longer enough, and there is growing focus on cyber recovery and resiliency. It’s a shift from being reactive to proactive and gives organisations the tools to quickly recover from cyber incidents and safeguard their sensitive data. Companies are aware of shortfalls in their backup strategies. Recognising their protection gaps, as many as 92% intend to increase their data protection budgets in the next year.”

Clements said BaaS adoption would accelerate over the next three years, with some research finding that 75% of organisations will adopt BaaS to protect on-premises and cloud workloads, up from 16% today.

A poll of webinar attendees found that 97% expect to back up using cloud solutions as part of their strategy within the next two years.

Clements highlighted Veeam’s capabilities, noting that IDC ranks Veeam as the number one market leader in the data replication and protection market, and says Veeam provides secure recovery five times faster.

Veeam has strategic alliances and partnerships with organisations such as Microsoft, which drives continuous product innovation, he said.

Introducing the Veeam Data Platform and Veeam Data Cloud, Driaan Odendaal, Senior Systems Engineer at Veeam Africa, explained: “The Data Platform is the self-managed solution offering protection for hybrid and multicloud data. The Veeam Data Cloud is a fully managed cloud backup service which protects against accidental deletion, external and internal security threats, and retention policy gaps. It also supports legal and compliance requirements, managing hybrid deployments and migrations.”

He noted: “The shared responsibility model says that just because something is on the cloud, doesn't mean it’s protected – it is our responsibility to make sure our critical data is being protected in SaaS platforms.”

Odendaal said: “Microsoft recently brought out their own backup solution, and we were the first vendor to integrate with it, as we complement each other very well. Microsoft Express is excellent for bulk backups and bulk restores, whereas Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 has a Flex solution, which is a lot more granular. It supports Teams, where Express does not, and we have an exit strategy, where Express does not. Express and Flex are available together within Premium, and you can mix and match them within the Microsoft 365 environment.”

He also highlighted Veeam Data Cloud for Azure, which protects Azure VMs, SQL, files and virtual networks; Veeam Data Cloud for EntraID; and Veeam Data Cloud for Salesforce.

Veeam Data Cloud Vault will also be available in South Africa later this month, where users can offload a second or third copy of their backups into Veeam Data Cloud Vault to support Veeam’s 3-2-1-1-0 rule (three copies of your data, two off-site on one separate media, one immutable copy and zero failures) for enhanced data resilience and protection.