You would think a business knows what its critical applications are. Yet it’s fairly common during disaster recovery (DR) tests to discover that key applications and services have been overlooked. Cloud has made it even easier to forget about important workloads, as businesses assume the cloud provider is taking the necessary steps to protect their data. Yet that isn’t the case; when you do DR planning, the data stored in Software as a Service (SaaS) systems, such as Microsoft Office 365, needs to be part of that plan.

SaaS Data Protection

That’s because the SaaS provider addresses only a few aspects of disaster recovery and data loss. They are responsible for ensuring that the service remains available despite hardware problems and natural disasters. They may also provide the ability to recover data shortly after a user accidentally deletes it.

SaaS Gaps in Data Protection

However, SaaS providers don’t protect you against other types of data loss such as tampering with data by employees, accidental deletion of data, or malware that corrupts or steals data. If data is corrupted, the SaaS provider may not have an uncorrupted copy since they may not retain historical versions of data. This means you may not be able to  satisfy compliance requirements or e-discovery requests. SaaS providers also don’t make your data accessible to you outside the SaaS environment. As a result, you can’t use their copies of your data to support other application development, in analytics projects, or if the cloud environment has an outage.

Finally, remember, it’s your data. You need your own copy in case the vendor shuts down or disappears. You’ll also need your own copy of your data to avoid vendor lock-in and shift back to on-premises or to a different vendor.

Backing Up SaaS Data

The method for backing up SaaS data will depend on the vendor and the kind of access they provide. For some SaaS offerings, such as Microsoft Office 365, there are third-party backup tools that provide a robust backup solution. Other SaaS offerings may require you to develop your own methods, such as downloading a report or exporting data from a screen on a regularly scheduled basis.

However you backup your SaaS data, make sure you keep your backup safe through good practices such as the 3-2-1 backup rule and encrypting the backup storage media.

Prescient Solutions help businesses in Chicago and Schaumburg develop comprehensive disaster recovery solutions to protect all their data. Contact us to learn more about how you can ensure you don’t stop protecting your data when you leverage a SaaS application.