BaaS vendors deliver data protection as a service by hosting the backup software and the primary backup repository in privately operated or public cloud data centers. The backup infrastructure, including backup software and backup servers and storage, is managed by the BaaS vendor. Customers are still responsible for implementing backup policies and performing recovery tasks, but are not responsible for the day-to-day maintenance and operation of the backup system.
Digital communications governance and archiving solutions (DCGA) are designed to enforce corporate governance and regulatory compliance across a growing number of digital communication tools available to employees. For the various communication tools in use across the enterprise, DCGA solutions enable consistent policy management, enforcement and reporting capabilities. Enterprise organizations face a growing number of regulatory mandates, such as the Financial Industry Regulation Authority (FINRA), Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In addition, they must adhere to corporate governance guidelines, such as proper employee conduct and handling of sensitive data, in the use of digital communication tools. The DCGA market aligns to vendors that develop archive- and platform-integrated solutions, which capture and analyze communication channels, and those that solely develop communication connectors to a variety of communication tools used by enterprises. Organizations utilize DCGA solutions to proactively manage and collect communication content. As part of their direct integration and ability to centralize access to communication data, DCGA solutions facilitate multiple use cases such as supervision, surveillance, e-discovery and data insights. While email has been the most traditional communication channel in the scope of DCGA solutions, there are multiple types of communication channels to be factored into a governance strategy. The scope of these communication tools is constantly changing as new messaging applications are frequently introduced to the market and adopted by employees. Recent evidence suggests enterprise organizations’ customers are dictating the communication tool of choice.
Gartner defines backup and data protection platforms as technologies that capture point-in-time copies of enterprise data for the purpose of recovering it from multiple data loss scenarios, enhancing data protection initiatives, and expanding data insights and access capabilities. These technologies protect enterprise data, applications and infrastructure in hybrid, multicloud and SaaS environments. Backup and data protection platforms are available as software-only, integrated appliances and vendor-developed and hosted backup as a service (BaaS).
Gartner defines file and object storage platforms as software and/or hardware platforms that offer object and distributed file system technologies for storing and managing unstructured data over NFS, SMB and Amazon S3 access protocols. File and object storage platforms store, secure, protect and scale an organization’s unstructured data with access over the network using protocols such as NFS, SMB and Amazon S3. Use cases include analytics, workload consolidation, backup and archiving, hybrid cloud, object-native applications, cloud IT operations, and high-performance files.