BaaS vs. DRaas for Higher Education Institutions

What Is BaaS, and How Does It Benefit Higher Education?

Backup as a Service can be provided by a third party that offers data backups at an offsite location. The provider manages and maintains the necessary underlying infrastructure necessary to back up the data and potentially recover it.

For these reasons and others, BaaS is an ideal technology for higher education:

• It side-steps issues of limited staff and fragmented IT ownership.
• It offers a standard solution that departments and workgroups can adopt and customize as they need.
• It gets IT out of the capital expenditure cycle of constantly upgrading disk arrays and, even worse, tape libraries.
• It shifts costs to an operational expenditure model that better matches project lifecycles and research grant requirements.

Higher education IT teams can use BaaS to quickly detach themselves from services such as end-user device backup and decentralized application and server backups. BaaS vendors are anxious to take on these more pedestrian workloads. This lets on-campus IT teams focus on more value-added backup requirements, such as Software as a Service backups, research data and on-campus file server backups.

When shopping for BaaS options for their campuses, IT teams should focus on some higher education-specific requirements, such as scalability and storage economics, compliance and governance, and integration with campus identity and access management (IAM) technologies.

On the scalability and economic fronts, IT teams should negotiate a service that can scale up as campus needs change (e.g., digitization of records or the creation of data-intensive research projects) but also offer different tiers of storage to budget-conscious departments. For example, technologies such as Amazon S3 Glacier storage offer a model of how backups with multihour or multiday recovery times can be delivered in a more cost-effective way. Backup services that offer deduplication and compression can see huge savings in storage requirements because of the propensity of faculty members to keep multiple copies of the same research data. A good approach for schools is to negotiate a flat-rate contract with storage caps and to carve out known high-volume research computing groups separately.

RELATED: How Backup as a Service protects higher education data.

Higher education compliance and governance is also more complicated than for typical enterprises. The usual regulatory landscape of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and HIPAA is complicated by research grant requirements that may require U.S.-only storage, FIPS-compliant encryption of all data at rest and regimented retention policies that extend out for up to a decade. When looking at BaaS vendors, IT teams should identify institution-specific policies and communicate them early on to help narrow the field and save time.

Finally, IT teams may want to consider integration with campus IAM technologies as part of any BaaS offering. When thinking about a small number of servers, some duplication of credential management may be considered acceptable. But in a higher education environment where faculty, labs, departments and research groups may all be self-managing backups through a BaaS vendor, tight integration with the campus IAM is really a requirement.

What Is DRaaS, and How Does It Benefit Higher Education?

DRaaS replicates an entire IT environment in the cloud, allowing for rapid restoration of critical applications and systems. While BaaS focuses on backing up data and making those backups accessible, DRaaS is centered on business continuity, meaning the systems that actually use the data protected under BaaS. In an ideal scenario, all higher education institutions would have both a backup plan and a recovery plan.

While backups are foundational, disaster recovery is more situational. Universities are not big adopters of DRaaS due to complexity and the ongoing push to cloud-based services. When schools do invest in DRaaS, they do so strategically for high-value, time-sensitive services.

The higher education environment is also fundamentally different from typical enterprises and public sector organizations. Technologies such as high-performance research computing clusters aren’t offered by DRaaS providers — and even if they were, replicating the enormous amounts of research data would be impractical, expensive and slow. Other factors, such as decentralized IT ownership, budget volatility, and research agreements that govern data geography and encryption, make general DRaaS a difficult match for higher education.

KEEP LEARNING: Ask these five questions to DRaaS providers before picking a solution.

DRaaS does make sense in some areas, such as services with huge impact, a zero-loss recovery point objective, and a recovery time objective of minutes or hours. Typical applications in this category are student information systems and enterprise resource planning systems such as Oracle’s PeopleSoft. When these are still running on-campus, especially in virtualized environments, DRaaS is a reasonable way to deliver higher levels of reliability for these strategically critical services.

DRaaS is also attractive as workloads shift to cloud service providers. By taking a few essential remaining on-campus applications and contracting for DRaaS, IT teams may be able to shut down their own secondary disaster recovery sites. This reduces both capital and operational expenditures and outsources very specialized knowledge of DR replication, orchestration and recovery to a managed service provider. As the number of on-campus applications appropriate for DR drops, IT teams should absolutely consider shifting their remaining DR responsibilities from a self-run secondary data center to DRaaS.