The SaaS-data protection disconnect: Are you sleepwalking into a catastrophe?

In recent years, demand for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions such as Salesforce, Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365 has exploded. Indeed, by 2025 it’s been projected that SaaS will account for 85 percent of the software that organizations use.

While these cloud-powered software services are now mission-critical for most organizations, many are sleepwalking their way into a potential data loss disaster. Why? Because they’re relying on their SaaS providers to do all the heavy lifting where data protection is concerned.

The problem is that the majority of SaaS solutions are run on a shared responsibility model. This means that vendors often only supply rudimentary data protection features that, at best, will only offer adequate protection in a defined number of scenarios.

As a consequence, some organizations are discovering the hard way that what they assumed was protected and recoverable isn’t.

The SaaS-data backup disconnect -- why you need to take responsibility

It may be easy to assume that because SaaS vendors take the operational strain with regard to the delivery and management of off-the-shelf applications, they will take care of everything else too. This includes taking responsibility for protecting your SaaS data and applications. However, moving to the cloud does not eliminate your data protection responsibilities.

In the shared responsibility models employed by SaaS solutions, the SaaS provider is responsible for protecting a lot of things: the application, the operating system, virtualization, hardware and network. Providers will also resolve issues related to hardware and software failure, natural disasters, power outages, and physical intrusion. At the end of the day, it’s their data centers powering the applications, not yours.

Meanwhile, as a customer, you retain responsibility for protecting your users and data. This includes taking steps to protect your SaaS data from issues caused by human error (accidental deletions), programmatic or configuration errors, malicious insiders deleting data, external hackers, viruses and malware.

Without a reliable data protection strategy in place for your SaaS applications, your data could prove unrecoverable should disaster strike.

Backing up SaaS-data isn’t easy

Securing your mission-critical SaaS can prove a complex proposition, especially as most organizations deal with more than one SaaS vendor. As a result, organizations will have to address the challenge of data fragmentation across their entire SaaS landscape.

On paper, this might seem like an academic issue but the reality is that each SaaS vendor runs their application in an isolated island where customers’ data is stored in a cloud tenant or datacenter. Added to which, SaaS vendors use different cloud vendors and technology stacks. All of this will have different operational limitations and service boundaries, especially where data protection is concerned. So getting data out may involve proprietary protocols for each SaaS vendor.

This can prove particularly troublesome for larger organizations that are typically utilizing an average of 177 SaaS applications.

The best way to address the challenge of protecting data across a patchwork of SaaS solutions is to deploy a single vendor-agnostic SaaS-Backup solution that will provide an isolated and tamperproof copy of data and data objects contained in SaaS applications and workloads

Vendor-agnostic SaaS-Backup: the advantages

Rather than resorting to multiple different SaaS backup solutions, each with its own structures and user interfaces, utilizing a single vendor-agnostic SaaS-Backup solution cuts through administration complexity to provide an easy-to-manage and streamlined approach to data protection. It will also deliver a single pane of glass visibility into data stored across a patchwork of vendors.

When it comes to selecting the best solution for the job, organizations should look for a fully hosted SaaS-Backup service that offers fully automated backup and recovery for Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Alongside ensuring that you reap the benefit of a backup solution that is easy to onboard and deploy, a hosted backup infrastructure delivers scalable and secure protection and granular data recovery. Protecting your application data against any eventuality, including accidental deletions and ransomware. All of this makes it possible to restore data to the same or another SaaS vendor without issue and build up a retention of backups to satisfy regulatory compliance.

Resolve your SaaS-data backup disconnect

When it comes to SaaS data, complacency isn’t an option. Especially where business continuity and compliance is concerned.

Today’s independent third-party and vendor-agnostic solutions deliver the advanced protection, control and recovery capabilities today’s organizations need to assure their mission-critical SaaS data is never exposed to potential risks like outages, accidental deletion and malware attacks. Ensuring that multiple immutable copies of backups are stored in an independent cloud that is dedicated to data protection and not dependent on large hyperscalers.

Providing the ideal way to protect all data in various SaaS platforms, organizations gain a single and infinitely scalable solution that eliminates the operational burden of data protection. This means organizations can confidently make the most of their SaaS investments.

With 45 percent of organizations saying that accidental and malicious deletions are the top cause of SaaS data loss, initiating an isolated and tamperproof backup is critical for protecting your SaaS data and applications.

Image Credit: Wayne Williams

Kevin Cole is global director, technical product marketing, Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.