Cloud

Commvault's BaaS Metallic Safeguards SMBs 24/7

Metallic Backup as a Service by Commvault can help businesses streamline and safeguard Office 365 adoption. Here’s how.

Doug Bonderud is an award-winning writer capable of bridging the gap between complex and conversational across technology, innovation and the human condition.

Small and midsize businesses have been particularly hard-hit by the pandemic. Small Business Trends notes that SMB revenue dropped more than 50 percent, and data from the World Economic Forum revealed that, more than six months into the pandemic, at least 25 percent of small businesses were still closed.

Those that survived — and are hoping to thrive as markets begin to stabilize — share a common feature: agility. In practice, this meant rapid moves to remote work underpinned by the adoption of cloud-based productivity tools such as Microsoft Office 365. Data bears out this business shift: By October 2020, there were more than 115 million active Teams users, and by November, SharePoint reached 200 million users.

However, this quick cloud uptake comes with challenges. As noted by Security magazine, 71 percent of companies using Office 365 products endured cyberattack attempts last year, while a quarter of small businesses suffered a permanent data loss in 2020 because they lacked robust backups.

The result? Comprehensive Backup as a Service (BaaS) solutions are now critical to help SMBs bridge the gap between increasing cloud adoption and potential data risk. Here’s how Metallic, Commvault's Backup as a Service solution can help.

DISCOVER: Take a closer look at backup solutions with Commvault.

Third-Party Data Protection Is Useful in the Cloud

Zack Brigman, senior product marketing manager for CommVault, puts it simply: “Small businesses are looking for solutions around Office 365. While Office 365 has only been leaned on more for remote work during the pandemic, risks like ransomware, corruption and bad actors inside businesses challenge every Software as a Service application, including Office 365.”

Part of the problem comes down to the paradox of small business operation: Since many don’t have the budgets for substantive IT teams, they need cloud-based productivity solutions that are easy to implement and activate. However, this same lack of available expertise makes it difficult to manage solutions at scale, especially as the risks of data loss ramp up.

Brigman also highlights the need for shared responsibility. “While the SaaS provider is responsible for their app,” he says, “customers are responsible for protecting their own data, whether it is created, brought to or leaving the system. As a result, almost all SaaS vendors follow a ‘shared responsibility’ model; Microsoft follows a similar model and recommends third-party protection for dedicated controls to protect data in the cloud.”

Serving Security Across the Stack

From emails, contacts and calendars in Exchange to messaging in Teams, group sites in SharePoint, documents in Word and file repositories in OneDrive, Office 365 demands comprehensive data backup coverage.

Metallic Backup as a Service offers a way for SMBs to embrace the shared responsibility model without increasing complexity. As noted by Brigman, small businesses “need to identify data that needs to be recovered, they need long-term and extended data retention beyond recycle bin limits and they need to meet service-level agreement compliance requirements.” Addressed in isolation, each of these tasks is fraught with potential pitfalls — but Metallic makes things easy.

“Metallic BaaS lets companies protect their Microsoft investment with unlimited Azure storage and unlimited retention built in to meet SLA regulatory requirements,” he says, “along with offering granular search and flexible point-in-time and out-of-place restore options across all Office 365 apps so data can stay protected, compliant and rapidly recoverable.”

Even better, costs are transparent and per user, including components and storage required to back up and retrieve data on demand. As a result, SMBs only pay for what they use — and get exactly what they need.

WATCH: Explore the human element of security in the new normal.

Streamlining Backup as a Service Adoption

Of course, even the best BaaS solution won’t help SMBs if it takes an entire IT team weeks to integrate and install.

Metallic makes it easy. “One thing we’ve seen is that SMBs have a limited IT budget,” says Brigman. “They can’t afford the burden associated with administering and nursing solutions. As a SaaS-delivered solution, businesses can easily configure Metallic and be up and running within minutes.”

Backups can be tailored to business needs, configured based on retention priorities and set to automated schedules that best meet current operational requirements. As a solution built on the Azure cloud, Metallic delivers rapid recovery of Office 365 data anywhere, anytime, along with the ability to maintain existing file structure. “Microsoft offers a robust, best-in-class productivity suite,” notes Brigman. “With Metallic, businesses can maximize their Microsoft investment by comprehensively protecting Office 365 data from today’s threats, all while considerably reducing the workload for their admins.”

SMBs in the cloud require the same protection and performance as their enterprise counterparts, but don’t have access to comparable IT staff or resources. Metallic BaaS bridges the gap with high-performing, easily configurable and completely customizable backup services that are enterprise-grade — and SMB-friendly.

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