One of the largest, modern-day concerns around SaaS usage is the protection of stored customer data. SaaS backup solutions are designed to store and protect data created and operated within SaaS applications. The backup data is stored either in alternative data centers, in the cloud, or on-premises. If a SaaS application fails or becomes vulnerable, the information is stored securely and is easily restored to a functional state.
Though, such traditional SaaS backup solutions can quickly spiral out of control. According to a report from ESG, for every terabyte (TB) of production data, another 9 TB of secondary data is typically generated, which rapidly offsets any cost savings due to ever-decreasing storage costs on public clouds.
Many SaaS backup solutions have features relevant to the software they are backing up. For example, SaaS backup software that integrates with email systems may have data archiving features specifically for email. Despite this, some key elements are present in most SaaS backup software, including SaaS product integration, data storage through the cloud or on-premises, data encryption, data restoration, and data auditing and search.
There are several ingestion tools available to centralize data into data warehouses. Each of these tools involve making trade-offs between ease of use, robustness and scalability, and data security.
Data ingestion is the transportation of data from assorted sources to a storage medium where it can be accessed, used, and analyzed by an organization. The destination is typically a data warehouse, data mart, database, or a document store. Sources may be almost anything, including SaaS data, in-house apps, databases, spreadsheets, or even information scraped from the Internet.
Ingest tools that are provided as managed services are easy to use. There is no need to deploy and manage software or provision hardware, and these tools are built as multi-tenant architectures running inside of the cloud accounts of the vendors themselves.
SaaS backup strategies are vital as many SaaS platforms cannot protect users from causes of data loss. Providers like Microsoft 365, G Suite, Salesforce, and Dropbox recommend third-party backup for recovery from SaaS data loss. Additionally, many regulatory laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOX mandate that protecting SaaS data is a “shared responsibility,” and an organization needs to have accurate recovery capabilities in the event of data loss. Ultimately, the cloud itself is the answer to protect SaaS data. Cloud-to-cloud backup harnesses the many advantages of the cloud to provide reliable backup and quick recovery.
