Protecting Your SaaS Data Is Your Responsibility

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Businesses worldwide are investing heavily in software-as-a-service (SaaS) or cloud computing solutions in the search for flexible, reliable and affordable software infrastructure. The International Data Corporation (IDC) anticipated the cloud software market to reach $151.6 billion by 2020, but that was before the global pandemic hit, which triggered a rapid shift to remote work environments. However, it’s still highly probable that this prediction has already been surpassed, with this exceptional growth only bound to strengthen in the ‘new normal.’ Unfortunately, this growth has also made the cloud a darling of cybercriminals, which means nothing on the cloud is 100% safe. 

Your SaaS data, which is more accessible, and in some cases, more secure within a cloud infrastructure, is not fully protected from loss or corruption. If you, as a business, choose to look away from this glaring reality, you would be acting willfully ignorant. Through this blog, we’ll tell you how your SaaS data is only partially secured by SaaS platforms and give you three reasons why you must back up your SaaS data.  

How Your SaaS Data Is Actually Protected 

While responding to a survey by ESG, 37 per cent of IT executives admitted that they believed SaaS providers fully protected their business data. While this is not entirely false, it isn’t entirely true either. SaaS providers protect your data only concerning accessibility and availability (downtime at their end) and infrastructure-related failures or threats.   

Here’s how leading SaaS providers, like Google and Microsoft, for example, secure your SaaS data. 

G Suite: Google stores multiple replicas of your data at various locations, ensuring the data remains accessible in the event of a hardware failure. Although its infrastructure doesn’t offer native backup capabilities, it provides high availability (HA) with erasure code. 

Office 365 (O365): Given that the infrastructure of O365 is not unified, the backup capabilities for each application differ. O365 offers various backup options, but you must remember that even in its service level agreement (SLA), Microsoft only addresses the availability of data, not its recoverability. And yet, 57% of those responding to ESG’s survey relied on O365’s native recovery functionality, while 27% did not have any in-house recovery capabilities. 

Simply put, both G Suite and Office 365 offer, at best, temporary archives of your data. However, archives are not the same as reliable backups that you can recover or restore from. They neither guarantee protection of your data from prevalent threats nor data recovery post a security disaster. 

Three Reasons Why You Need SaaS Backup 

Having understood that your SaaS data is only partially protected, it’s time to look at three reasons why you need to tighten up loose ends and avail SaaS backup immediately. 

Reason 1: Various Data Loss Risks and Security Threats at Your End 

Here are some threats looming over your organization’s data and hardware/software infrastructure that can cause severe damage – enough to grind your business to a temporary or permanent halt:  

• User error: Whether it’s falling for a phishing scam or mistakenly deleting crucial data, user errors have accounted for 23% of security breaches in 2020. 
• Illegitimate deletion requests: It’s impossible for a SaaS provider to determine whether a deletion request was done in haste or with malicious intent. It will honour your deletion request no matter what. One illegitimate command and poof! Your data will vanish. 
• Sync errors: While introducing third-party tools into your IT environment helps streamline your business, it leads to the possibility of your valuable SaaS data becoming vulnerable. 
• Insider threats: Malicious insiders have accounted for 30% of data breaches in 2020. One employee with malicious intent is enough to bring the whole house down. 

In their respective SLAs, not even leading SaaS platforms, such as G Suite, Office 365 and Salesforce, guarantee the security of your data from vulnerabilities at your end.

Reason 2: “Shared Responsibility” 

Contrary to popular belief, SaaS providers are not responsible for protecting the integrity or availability of your data. Cloud security and data protection is a shared responsibility where cloud service providers (CSPs) are responsible for the security, reliability and accessibility of their cloud product or solution infrastructure, while customers are responsible for securing the data they upload and store on the cloud. 

Essentially, you are ultimately responsible for protecting your organization’s data from loss, destruction or unauthorized access and ensuring that the data is logistically, operationally and contractually secure and viable.  

Even global data protection regulations, such as GDPR and HIPAA, have defined and emphasized the accountability to be shared by the controller (your business) and the processor (third-party service providers such as SaaS companies). It’s time for you to do your part. A study by Extra Hop claimed that by 2022, at least 95% of cloud security failures would be the customer’s fault. You wouldn’t want to be counted among those businesses, would you? 

Reason 3: SaaS Providers Lack a Robust Backup 

A robust backup should ideally fulfil four basic needs – ease of backing up and accessing data, built-in capability to secure data from unauthorized access, quick recovery of data, and compliance with all significant data regulations. Merely relying on SaaS providers to protect your SaaS data will not fulfil any of these needs. In the absence of a proper and complete backup, you are essentially playing Russian roulette with one of your businesses most valuable and vital assets – its data. 

Invest in the Right Backup Solution Today 

If you continue to wait much longer, you will eventually fall victim to a nefarious cybercriminal or even a simple, honest employee mistake that could compromise crucial data your organization runs on.   

By investing in the right backup solution, you can ensure that your organization’s data is protected from a wide range of threats and drastically minimize the risk of a data breach. Talk to us today to help us set you up with an enterprise-class and robust SaaS backup solution that is tailor-made for your business.