By 2020, there will be 126 million active users of Microsoft Office 365, seven million active users of Google’s G Suite and five million active users of Salesforce, which all fall under the banner of Software as a Service (SaaS). This means that your applications will be accessed online via subscription, rather than installed on individual machines. But if you’re not hosting these apps on your infrastructure, how do you know that your data is being backed up and protected?
According to Gartner, less than 25 percent of SaaS application users have a backup solution in place. This is a new part of the backup market where customers are starting to figure out they need backup, but no leading vendor has yet to emerge in this space.
Why customers are responsible for their data in the cloud
Some users might assume that the SaaS provider is responsible for backing up their data, but this is generally not the case. As the graphic below shows, data remains the customer responsibility when using SaaS applications:
What’s more, the data protection offered by SaaS applications can often be insufficient, leading to the following risks:
- Permanent data loss: After a limited retention period, your data will be permanently deleted by your SaaS application vendor. This data is unrecoverable after it is permanently deleted.
- Risk of non-compliance: If you can’t demonstrate good protection of your SaaS application data to an auditor, you could leave yourself open to a fine or other enforcement action.
- Elevated recovery costs: While there is no guarantee that a SaaS vendor can recover your data, in cases where recovery is possible, it could cost $10K USD per request and take six to eight weeks.
How purpose-built SaaS data protection can help
A backup and recovery service for SaaS applications can provide you with secure and scalable data protection across your entire SaaS environment. For instance, Veritas SaaS Backup offers unified data protection across multiple SaaS applications with up to six automatically scheduled backups a day.
Veritas also provides a simple and intuitive console to view backups and recover data, access from any device at any time, and no hardware to purchase, software to install or maintenance and version upgrades to perform. Read this data sheet for more information on Veritas SaaS Backup.
