Balancing Resources & Risk: CxO Thoughts on Data Protection as a Service.

Today’s enterprises generate mission-critical data at a pace that shows no sign of slowing. Market analysts put the compound annual growth rate near 36 percent through 2025. That data fuels customer experience, regulatory audits, and every operational decision you make.

Meanwhile, four powerful trends—and one “super-threat”—are converging to reshape how your boards and executive colleagues think about data protection when it comes to backup, recovery, and business continuity. And, this is materializing while you are also dealing with more stringent and penalizing regulations.

Why the Market Is Moving ...

1. Explosive Data Growth

Every customer touchpoint today produces more data than the last. Storing and protecting it internally stretches not only budgets but also staff.

2. Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS)

To innovate without ballooning capital spend, firms increasingly rent the best apps and platforms instead of building them.

3. Multi-Cloud Adoption

Once you embrace XaaS, spreading workloads across several clouds for performance, price, or compliance becomes a logical next step.

4. Automation Imperative

More data plus more clouds plus more regulation equals more complexity—unless you automate. Automation also prevents a one-for-one rise in head-count.

5. The Super-Threat: Cybercrime

Ransomware syndicates now target critical infrastructure, remote work gaps, and digital supply chains – not to mention the now frequent target, your backup data. Their tactics evolve weekly, and regulators have taken notice.

Together these forces push many organizations toward Data Protection-as-a-Service (DPaaS). But handing the keys to an outside provider deserves sober scrutiny.

Five Areas Worth Probing:

Governance That Actually Protects ...

A separation-of-duties governance framework should be non-negotiable:

1. Production vs. Backup Access: Your internal team should never hold admin rights in the backup environment.
2. Credential Segregation: Admin accounts for production and backup must be walled off.
3. Physical Separation: Keep production and backup infrastructure in different facilities to avoid a single point of failure.

Executive Checklist for Selecting a DPaaS Partner:

1. Validate Compliance Credentials — request external audit reports, not just marketing slides.
2. Probe Security Depth — ask for encryption key-management details and real-world incident-response timelines.
3. Inspect the SLA — look for measurable RPO/RTO targets and financial penalties that matter.
4. Test Their Roadmap — how often do they refresh platforms and who pays for upgrades?
5. Enforce Separation of Duties — demand architecture diagrams that prove isolation between your production domain and their backup domain.

The Upshot

Outsourcing data protection can materially reduce CapEx, reduce risk, and unlock talent—but only if you select a partner whose controls match your board’s risk appetite. Use the questions and checklist above to transform a complex technical decision into a straightforward business decision.

Ready to Compare Your Options?

It is a given that safeguarding growth-critical backup and business continuity data is high on your agenda.

We invite you to benchmark your own data protection posture relative to your backup data through a complimentary B4Restore Readiness Conversation. We can help you map and size your critical workloads, test your readiness against mandated Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives, and quantify and qualify where you are today.

Please visit: www.b4restore.com to learn more about forward-looking data protection as a service.

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