On the other hand, there is a significant increase in customer expectations in terms of resilience, requiring them to have powerful tools that not only protect data but also address the peculiarities of cloud-native elements and modern applications, ensuring smooth and fast recovery operations in case of disaster. This exponential growth is confirmed by a recent survey revealing that over 55% of companies intend to adopt multicloud and hybrid cloud models, despite a third of them admitting to having experienced an outage in the past two years, with 28% of these outages caused by public cloud or SaaS failures. While the importance of backing up Microsoft 365 is now (almost) well-known, the discussion changes when it comes to public cloud. The messages conveyed by cloud providers, designed to give the impression that everything is at your fingertips, along with common misconceptions such as relying on the built-in recycle bin/undo feature or server resilience, all contribute to creating confusion and the belief that backup is unnecessary. It may seem repetitive or obvious, but the golden rule when it comes to data backup is this: all data needs a backup, regardless of where it is located.
How the Azure Shared Responsibility Model Works
To fully understand the necessity of a backup, one must analyze Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Model. To ensure a highly resilient infrastructure, Azure divides its datacenters into regions, all interconnected by a low-latency network. By leveraging this redundant and interconnected design, it is possible to enhance the infrastructure’s resilience and increase its availability by replicating data across different availability zones and regions, resulting in an optimal experience for customers and users. However, despite the excellence of Azure’s services and infrastructure, data loss is still a possibility. For example, if data is accidentally deleted, an update goes wrong, or a ransomware attack occurs, replication between Azure datacenters will apply those changes everywhere. Consequently, applications and data could be lost or compromised. Therefore, to ensure maximum availability — as well as other aspects like compliance — an effective backup strategy is crucial.
Why Rely on a Backup Managed by a Managed Service Provider
The transition to the public cloud typically follows a fairly similar path for most companies. Underestimating the complexity of management, when it comes to adding cloud services to their data protection strategy, the first step is simply to integrate existing on-premises tools with a cloud storage layer. However, most companies soon realize that the power of cloud-based protection is not just about the location of the repository, but rather in the ongoing management experience of the overall solution. This is evident in 2024, where nearly 49% of companies have utilized cloud storage, while the remaining 51% have subscribed to a managed backup service. Even more interesting is that almost half have switched from an internal management mode to a managed service, confirming that to fully leverage the benefits of cloud-based protection, it is necessary to rely on experts.
