If your organisation is using Software as a Service (SaaS) based applications, you should implement SaaS data protection to safeguard your hosted data.

When you utilise SaaS-based applications, your data no longer resides within your organisation’s boundaries or within the control of your IT staff. So how do you handle situations where you need to restore a deleted, corrupted, or incorrectly edited object? How do you go back to a previous point-in-time copy? What happens when an employee leaves the firm and you delete their account? How do you ensure that you still have access to your intellectual property?

Implementing SaaS data protection safeguards your corporate data, regardless of where it resides. This includes data created and stored in SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com, Google Apps, and Microsoft Office 365.

Legacy Backup Solutions Aren’t Enough

As you evolve beyond your data centre servers to deploy SaaS-based solutions within your environment, your legacy backup software is unlikely to follow you. The reality is that many legacy backup solutions won’t be able to provide the data protection you need for your SaaS-hosted office productivity tools.

So what would be the cost to your business if you lose this data?

How do you answer your CEO who is looking for that important email that they accidentally deleted? How do you respond to the team that is looking to go back to a previous version of a document before collaborative editing caused too many changes to a current version? How long will they need to wait to get their data back? What is the process for such a recovery?

Though many SaaS providers perform their own backups, these are typically focused on protecting their own service and associated SLAs: they are not responsible for helping you retrieve deleted, edited, or corrupted information.

Protect Yourself with SaaS Data Protection

There are a number of compelling reasons to implement SaaS data protection. Here are four considerations that relate to Microsoft Office 365, but can be extended to other SaaS applications: –

1. Compliance. Many organisations fall under strict email and document retention regulations, where failure to comply can lead to expensive fines or worse. By default, deleted Office 365 data is non-recoverable after a maximum of 30 days. Longer retention times are only possible with more costly editions of Office 365. And if your Office 365 subscription is ever cancelled, all of your data is automatically deleted after 90 days. Having your own backup copies of your Office 365 data ensures that you can comply with regulations, regardless of your Office 365 edition or whether or not your subscription is cancelled.
2. Liability. The Office 365 terms of service currently limit Microsoft’s liability to $5,000, or your last 12 months of subscription fees, should anything happen to your data— assuming you can prove that it was Microsoft’s fault. In contrast, the liability you might face if your Office 365 data were lost is potentially unlimited. Given the amount of risk you bear, it’s prudent to keep a copy of your Office 365 backup data in a secure, non-Microsoft location.
3. Audit Rights. The Office 365 terms of service give you no audit rights. This is problematic if, as part of an audit, you are required to show the physical location where your data is stored. Maintaining a backup copy of your Office 365 data in a secure, UK-based location that you are able to audit may be an acceptable way to work around this problem.
4. Vendor Lock-In. Hosting all of your Office 365 data in the Microsoft cloud effectively marries you to Microsoft, for better or for worse. If you want to keep your options open, then maintaining a backup copy of your Office 365 data makes it much easier to consider migrating to another vendor’s office productivity service.

To help you overcome such challenges and reclaim control of your data, AssureStor delivers a comprehensive cloud-to-cloud SaaS data protection backup and recovery platform that includes support for Office 365, Google Apps, and Saleforce.com. With the AssureStor backup2cloud platform, based on Asigra technology, you have the ability to protect your SaaS data just like any other enterprise data within your IT environment.

Protect Your Data in the Cloud

Assurestor’s backup2cloud platform gives you access to your data at all times – even when you are not connected to your SaaS environment. By utilising backup2cloud to deliver SaaS data protection, you will gain assurance that your SaaS application-based data is archived and recoverable.

For more information on AssureStor’s backup2cloud services, please contact us.