Today, Google suffered a widespread outage forcing many of their services to crash, including Maps, Google search, Drive, and YouTube. According to heat maps, the outage largely affected users on the American East Coast, Central Europe, and Japan.
If you’re like most people, you probably rely on these services on a daily basis. So, what do you do when they’re unavailable, and you can’t access your files or use the apps as they’re intended? While it may just be a minor inconvenience if you can’t access YouTube or Maps, there can be much larger repercussions if your business files in Google Drive are inaccessible.
Unfortunately, there’s a common misconception at all SaaS app data stored in the cloud is 100% safe from outages or accidental deletion. While Google has their contingency plan when their servers go down, there’s no plan in place for restoring data to their customers (you and your users).
This outage is a great reminder that a third-party backup solution is a necessity when it comes to your SaaS data. The cloud is safe, but it’s not infallible and many of today’s cloud vendors lack the incentive to point out their vulnerabilities when it comes to backing up data in SaaS apps.
To learn more about data loss in SaaS applications (and how to ensure this doesn’t happen at your business), check out the full Forrester Research Report, “Back Up Your SaaS Data - Because Most SaaS Providers Don’t.”
In the future, be sure to watch out for Google outages via their app status page here.
