The state of SaaS backup & recovery 2025
By Angela ChangCloud applications like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are the backbone of modern business. However, the harsh reality is your SaaS data isn’t as safe as you think. Cybercrime is surging, cybercriminals are rapidly evolving and human error is inevitable. Built-in backup and recovery options in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace may not be enough for comprehensive data protection.
That’s why SaaS backup and recovery has become a top priority for IT and security professionals around the world. But how are they actually addressing this?
To find out, we surveyed over 3,000 IT and information security professionals worldwide. The State of SaaS Backup and Recovery Report 2025 uncovers backup and recovery challenges facing businesses and the key trends shaping data protection strategies.
This blog highlights some of the report’s top findings and how you can use them to strengthen your SaaS backup and recovery plans.
Cloud workloads are increasing
Businesses of all sizes and across industries are rapidly shifting their operations to the cloud for its flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness. According to The State of SaaS Backup and Recovery Report 2025, more than 50% of workloads and applications now run in public cloud environments. The number is expected to climb even higher, reaching 60% within the next two years. This surge is due to the growing reliance on SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Salesforce. These statistics also indicate just how critical cloud services are for businesses today.
Why are businesses adopting public cloud solutions
Public cloud solutions also offer several benefits besides cost savings and convenience. For modern organizations, cloud adoption is a strategic move to gain a competitive advantage in a digital-first world.
Our latest report reveals the top reasons behind this widespread cloud adoption.
Nearly 40% of respondents said their organization leverages cloud-based productivity platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace for seamless collaboration. These platforms empower teams to co-edit documents, communicate in real-time and access resources from virtually anywhere.
For 37% of businesses, the top driver for adopting public cloud solutions is disaster recovery. Public cloud infrastructure offers built-in redundancy, geo-replication and rapid failover capabilities, enabling organizations to recover from disruptions much faster than traditional on-prem systems. Just over 30% of businesses use cloud solutions for data warehousing while another 32% rely on the public cloud’s Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) to deploy, manage and scale databases on demand.
Top causes for SaaS data loss
While the shift to the cloud continues to increase, businesses need to understand that SaaS data isn’t immune to data loss. In fact, a staggering 87% of IT and security professionals surveyed in the State of SaaS Backup and Recovery Report 2025 admitted their organization suffered some form of SaaS data loss in the past 12 months. Malicious deletion, whether intentional or as part of a targeted cyberattack, was responsible for more than 50% of SaaS data loss incidents.
Accidental deletion or human error accounted for 34% of all data loss incidents. Misconfiguration and integration with a third-party app (each 30%) were major causes of data loss and disruption.
Only a small portion of respondents (13%) said their organization didn’t experience SaaS data loss in the past year. While this is encouraging, it also means that nearly 9 out of 10 organizations suffered data loss in cloud environments.
SaaS data recovery preparedness
The ability to recover quickly and efficiently is critical to minimizing downtime and maintaining business continuity in a crisis. Yet, as the report findings indicate, recovery timelines vary significantly.
Nearly half of the respondents (42%) said they could restore lost data within a few hours. Only 14% of organizations reported the ability to recover data in minutes. Alarmingly, over a third of respondents (35%) acknowledged that data recovery could take days or even weeks. Close to 10% of respondents admitted they were uncertain about their organization’s recovery timeframe. And 2% said they could not recover lost SaaS data at all.
Top SaaS data protection challenges
While cloud platforms offer several benefits, data protection isn’t one of them. Budgetary constraints remain the biggest challenge businesses face when protecting their cloud-based workloads, with 25% of IT professionals citing cost as the number one roadblock. For 22% of businesses, maintaining compliance in SaaS environments is a constant struggle. Another 22% of IT professionals reported struggling with overly complex, slow or unreliable recovery workflows. About 10% of respondents said having too many fragmented backup tools leads to inefficiencies, operational overhead and difficulty maintaining visibility. Roughly 10% of respondents pointed to alerting and reporting as their biggest challenge, highlighting how the lack of clear, actionable insights into backup systems makes it difficult to identify risks and missed backups.
Alarmingly, over 50% of respondents in the survey revealed that they spend more than two hours each day just managing their backups. That’s valuable time that could be spent on innovation or other strategic initiatives, not firefighting.
Gain expert insights and practical strategies to strengthen SaaS data protection
The findings from the State of SaaS Backup and Recovery Report 2025 indicate that SaaS data protection is critical for a business’s survival. Cloud workloads are growing rapidly, with over half already running in public cloud environments. And that number is only going up in the foreseeable future. Without a reliable SaaS backup and recovery solution, organizations risk non-compliance, lawsuits and heavy financial losses.
Our report offers valuable insights into how organizations back up, manage and recover their SaaS data and key trends shaping data protection. To help you turn these insights into action, we’re offering an on-demand webinar: The State of SaaS Backup 2025. Our experts break down the most critical insights from the report and walk you through proven strategies for:
- Strengthening your SaaS data protection capabilities
- Minimizing the risk of cloud data loss
- Staying ahead of cyberthreats and other SaaS data threats
