While the adoption of virtual technologies is accelerating, data protection tools have not kept pace. There is a gap in protection between physical and virtual markets, and some organizations are now turning to "on-demand" online backup-and-recovery services to fill this gap. This software -as-a-service (SaaS) model, which leverages disk-to-disk backup-and-recovery technology, is an option that can optimize data protection in virtual environments, and offer fast recovery times in the event of a data disruption or disaster.

The primary challenge in delivering backup-and-recovery SaaS to virtual machines is ensuring comprehensive disaster-recovery protection for all major operating systems, applications and files stored on those machines, via the Internet. SaaS has the ability to provide complete data protection, without requiring large upfront investments in infrastructure .

Integrated hot backups afforded by backup-and-recovery SaaS solutions ensure tight integration of the backup-and-recovery SaaS solution , ensuring that the operating system, application or data is still accessible to the user, and no downtime is required on the part of the virtual machine to complete the backup process.

Detecting block-level changes at the source, and only backing up those changes on a daily basis is another benefit of backing up virtual environments via a backup-and-recovery SaaS. For example, a virtual server hosting 10 million banking records may only experience 200,000 additions, changes or deletions on any given day-or a 2 percent rate of change. Using SaaS, a block-level backup records only those changed records, rather than the entire database, for greater efficiency.

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