The Unsuspected Liability: SaaS Data Continuity and Recovery

Every day, more and more organizations shift their most essential operations into software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications hosted in the cloud. At the same time, due to this shift, cybercriminals focus more on cloud services, which puts businesses in danger. SaaS applications are currently the most popular target for cyberattacks¹.

Most businesses have some form of business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) plan², but these plans frequently fail to consider essential SaaS application data that is required to keep operations running—thereby representing an essential gap in organizations’ preparedness levels. 

Even seasoned IT experts aren't always aware that backing up SaaS data is their obligation rather than the responsibility of their SaaS providers.
 

Unfortunately, many will learn the hard way that relying on SaaS providers to safeguard data introduces risk: around 40% of organizations experienced data loss due to a SaaS application breach in the past year (State of Data Resilience Report).

In the pre-SaaS paradigm, organizations could often perform full disaster recovery on their own, but the move to the cloud has introduced new complications and dependencies:

• Full SaaS application restoration requires the tenant to be restored and repopulated with data.
• Maintaining continuity in the meantime requires accessing SaaS data.

Consequences of the Cloud

In the on-premises model, meeting a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) largely depends upon backing up and restoring systems and associated customer data. Over time, organizations have addressed their continuity and recovery needs by investing in hardware and software solutions.

However, in the SaaS world, things are quite different. Maintaining continuity during—and recovering from—a disaster involving SaaS applications both depend upon:

1. How completely and quickly data can be accessed, regardless of the SaaS application’s state.
2. How completely and quickly data can be restored, once the application tenant is operational.

Therefore, for an organization to achieve its disaster recovery goals, it is necessary to account for both:

• Cloud data availability, which is largely the customer’s responsibility, and
• Cloud application availability (e.g., M365, Google Workspace, Salesforce), which the application vendor controls.

Ensuring SaaS Data Availability Without the Team or the Budget

For most organizations—i.e., those lacking the specialized skill sets and extensive resources required—the most reliable and cost-effective way to ensure the availability of SaaS data is to use a third-party data protection service.

Here are some of the significant benefits of using a service like Arcserve SaaS Backup in this context:

Manage Risk and Recover With Confidence

To help enterprises avoid disruption due to lost or inaccessible SaaS data, Arcserve SaaS Backup offers a dedicated, vendor-neutral SaaS data backup solution that is resilient, secure, and easy to use—after all, what good is a backup if you can't find what you're looking for or if it takes a long time to recover? 

Arcserve SaaS Backup can be quickly implemented and has simplicity baked into the platform. No training is needed—so you can get started right away.

Maintaining Business Continuity

While Arcserve SaaS Backup doesn’t replicate the application and all its functionality, it ensures SaaS data is always instantly accessible, in a usable format, so personnel can keep working even before applications and services become available. 

Administrators can provide users with a specific link, giving them secure access to all or parts of their data (or someone else's data, as required) within the entire backup history.

Administrators can also include additional safety measures, like granting access only for a configurable amount of time. These operations can be performed via the UI, but we recommend scripting them and leveraging the API for disaster recovery and other bulk activities.

Restoring From a Backup

The efficiency of Arcserve SaaS Backup's restore process is unparalleled. To restore from a backup, search for or browse the data you need and click "Restore." All your data and history are readily available in a modern web-based user interface that offers browsing and previews, downloads, and restores of your data elements. 

Read our latest ebook—When Disaster Strikes: A Guide to Data Recovery and Business Continuity—to learn more about current SaaS data vulnerabilities and real-life examples of advanced restoration best practices.

1 2024 Thales Cloud Security Study, Thales, June 2024

2 When Plan B Goes Wrong: Avoiding the Pitfalls of DRaaS, iland, June 2021