One solution that many organizations are exploring is Backup as a Service, in which a service provider is responsible for all of the management and maintenance of an organization’s backup environment. BaaS takes backup responsibilities out of the hands of in-house staff and turns them over to a partner, leaving health IT teams free to focus on more operation-oriented tasks.
“The partner is not just providing software and hardware to customers to run backups,” DiRado says. “This is a fully managed service.”
Important BaaS Capabilities to Consider
Healthcare organizations considering BaaS have a variety of options to choose from, so it’s important to keep different factors in mind when selecting a provider.
Management capabilities are an essential factor for selecting a BaaS provider. Backup environments frequently become more complex over time as organizations grow and add new IT capabilities. IT teams need to be able to keep track of numerous moving parts and interdependencies, which can help them spot potential vulnerabilities and other issues before they become problems. Some BaaS providers offer centralized management consoles that provide clear visibility into complex systems and simplify operations such as scheduling backups, preventing data corruption and setting backup priorities.
“Everything is visible in a single pane of glass,” DiRado says. “It can take all those moving parts and consolidate them in one place where you can log in and look at all your data.”
BaaS also moves maintenance tasks off the plate of in-house IT professionals. Activities such as patching, updating and testing backup systems are handled by the provider. Further, BaaS providers can scale up their services rapidly to accommodate the growth spurts that many digital transformation initiatives lead to.
“I think an important differentiating factor is how flexible a BaaS solution can be,” says Dustin Sears, an engineering manager for managed services backup and recovery with CDW. “It can be customized to meet, really, any sort of transformation that a healthcare organization is on.”
