Gartner’s Tips To Prevent Data Loss From SaaS Solutions

Critical business data lives everywhere today, whether it’s on your local machine, in the cloud, or in SaaS applications such as Google Apps, Office 365 or Salesforce. This data must be protected and backed up to ensure business continuity and maximum efficiency. What you may not know is that you need additional backup to protect this data in SaaS applications.

While each of these SaaS applications have some form of built-in data backup, it’s important to have an additional backup tool to further protect your data from threats. According to research from Gartner, some organizations do not realize that these offerings may fall short of your business needs. By adopting a third-party backup tool, you can have greater flexibility and control over your data.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest threats to your SaaS data.

• User deletion: A collaborator may accidentally delete a shared project, or you may delete a scrapped project and then later learn the data is still necessary.
• Data overwrites with incorrect data: SaaS applications hold large amounts of data that are constantly updated. When large data sets are imported, accidental overwriting is quite common.
• Data corruption: Through various means, your data can be corrupted and inaccessible without the proper backup solution.
• Data migration issues caused by incorrectly mapped fields: If incorrectly mapped fields are imported, the correct data may be overwritten in your shared database.
• Third-party applications errors: third-party applications can modify data in ways you didn’t intend. Some apps supply information for reporting, but don’t actually make any data changes. However there are other applications that change data, and therefore put your data at risk.

According to the Cloud Security Alliance, “data loss” was included among the Top 9 Cloud Security Threats. For businesses that experience data loss, statistics show that 60 percent of those companies will be out of business within six months of the disaster.

To help prevent data loss, it’s important to adopt a layered approach to protecting your company’s data, which involves all or a combination of the following measures:

• Good data management processes
• SaaS application training
• Robust password policies
• Automated backup with easy recover and restore

To overcome these issues, Gartner has provided some recommendations. Gartner recommends providing data protection mechanisms, purchasing SaaS backup tools and pushing SaaS vendors to offer more capabilities to help protect your data. For more information regarding backup for your SaaS applications, read Gartner’s full report: You May Need Additional Backup to Prevent Data Loss From Your SaaS Solutions.
Gartner, You May Need Additional Backup to Prevent Data Loss From Your SaaS Solutions, P. Rinnen, D. Russell, 20 January 2015.

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