Businesses are continuing to turn to the cloud to take advantage of its unique ability to facilitate agile, collaborative work environments and do more with less — all while lowering overall IT costs. But as more organizations make the shift, it’s critical that they address the inherent risks of working in collaborative cloud environments — particularly regarding the potential loss of software-as-a-service (SaaS) data. With the fast-growing adoption of SaaS apps, like Office 365, at an all-time high, the timing for fully understanding cloud data protection couldn’t be more critical.
In this slideshow, Jeff Erramouspe, VP and general manager of Spanning by EMC, outlines five reasons why organizations should make data protection for SaaS data a top priority.
Protecting SaaS Data
Click through for five reasons organizations need to ensure they have backup procedures in place for SaaS data, as identified by Jeff Erramouspe, VP and general manager of Spanning by EMC.
Human Error
SaaS vendors can’t protect you from yourself.
Office 365 is a great platform that makes it easy for employees to edit the same document at the same time or view updates to workloads in real time, across any device. Unfortunately, the collaborative environment also makes it easy for files to be accidentally deleted. In fact, according to CloudHQ, human error is behind 64 percent of all data loss incidents. It’s not that SaaS apps like Office 365 don’t want to protect organizations from data loss, it’s that the inherent structure of their agreements with clients means they have no way of knowing if the action was purposeful or not. Therefore, they are obligated to carry out all user requests.
Hackers
Hackers exist outside (and inside) your organization.
Given the amount of value in their cloud data, organizations must take extra steps to protect it from outside hackers, as well as insiders who may maliciously alter or permanently delete business-critical data. With the help of third-party backup and recovery, organizations can be sure that whatever data is lost due to hacktivism or disgruntled employees isn’t gone forever.
Short Retention Span
Vendors can’t always get your data back.
While Office 365 has methods to preserve deleted files, emails or entire mailboxes, the data may only be retained temporarily depending on the policies applied to the data, and may not be easily recoverable. Data is not always recoverable after this period has expired, which might come as a shock to the 95 percent of organizations that believe their SaaS provider can and will easily restore their lost data. Having third-party backup and recovery capabilities is the only way organizations can ensure they are fully protected against data loss should this retention period run out.
Compliance
Auditors still care about the cloud.
As with storing data on-premise, auditors want to be sure that organizations are complying with both IT governance and regulatory requirements. However, not all SaaS applications protect data in such a way that automatically complies with these requirements. Therefore, it’s important for organizations of all sizes to do their due diligence to ensure data is readily accessible in the cloud according to key requirements for compliance.
Restoration
More than recovery, it’s about restore.
In today’s collaborative cloud, it’s not enough to just recover lost data. Organizations need to be able to quickly restore it to any point in time. With the ability to “turn back the clock,” organizations can avoid wasting time spent recreating things like labels, file structures, reports or sharing settings.
