By Bret Piatt, CEO
Last month, we introduced the world to CyberFortress, a global company that can protect and rapidly recover data for any system a business may have, from Microsoft 365 and desktops to servers, VMs and entire data centers. It’s an expansive, audacious claim, but we’ve got the experts and solutions to back it up.
And we’re not stopping there. While we have a global presence, we’ll be expanding our footprint with new offices and support in additional languages. Our R&D team is also hard at work adding new capabilities to existing backup and recovery solutions and developing new ones.
In the short term, however, I can talk about two new solutions that we’ll be rolling out later this year around SaaS data protection. We currently provide SaaS Backup & Recovery For Microsoft 365, but we’re well aware that organizations heavily depend on other SaaS applications. So our development efforts are working full speed ahead on backup and recovery solutions for additional, critical SaaS application.
Investing in SaaS Recovery Solutions
We’re committed to new SaaS solutions because it’s increasingly the way software is delivered — and for good reason. There’s no installation to complete, no licenses to buy, no underlying hardware to manage. The provider takes care of it all for you.
But that’s a deceptive comfort when it comes to your data, because it leads businesses to believe that the SaaS provider backs it all up, so that if there’s accidental or malicious deletion, for example, it’ll be simple to recover. In fact, analyst firm ESG found that more than one-third (35%) of companies surveyed relied completely on their SaaS vendor to protect their data.
That’s a problem, because more than four in five (81%) have had to recover Microsoft 365 data. And of this group, only 15% said they were able to recover 100% of that data, and just 43% of respondents recovered between 76% and 99% of it. That means that more than half recovered just three-quarters of their data or less.
The vast majority of SaaS providers operate on a shared responsibility model, which means that the SaaS company protects and secures their infrastructure, but the customer is responsible for protecting their data. Salesforce, for instance, encourages customers to protect data with third-party solutions, and Microsoft is very explicit about the need for external backup in its licensing agreement: “You should have a regular backup plan as Microsoft won’t be able to retrieve Your Content or Data once your account is closed.”
SaaS Retention Policies are Different Than Backup Solution
It’s important to note that while most SaaS providers have a retention policy, that’s very different from backup. Here’s an example. Let’s say that someone in sales accidentally deletes a key spreadsheet that’s used to create a critical annual report. If the deletion isn’t discovered within 30 days, Microsoft 365 will have permanently deleted the document from the recycle bin. Without a separate backup, that data is deleted forever.
Here’s another example. A mid-level executive engages in fraudulent activity and systematically deletes records and emails to cover their tracks Unless there’s a backup, when lawyers demand those emails as part of discovery, the company will have nothing to give them. It opens up the nasty possibility of serious legal problems.
And then there are outages. They’re not unheard of. Salesforce suffered a 15-hour outage in May 2019, though it took many customers much longer to get back up and running, and Microsoft suffered a one-hour outage just last month due to a fiber cut. Without SaaS backups, you’re at the mercy of the provider’s ability to get the service working again.
CyberFortress is Filling the Saas Backup and Recovery Gap
As a leading managed data protection and recovery provider, CyberFortress is enabling customers to protect all their data from a single vendor with the confidence that, if ever they need to recover, there will always be a human being on the other end of the phone line to help.
The world is moving quickly to SaaS. Companies cannot afford to leave the data in SaaS apps unprotected.
Learn much more about the challenges and requirements of protecting data in Microsoft 365 in our e-book: Microsoft 365 Data Protection.
