The Threat of User Error in SaaS Apps

Everything you’ve read about what SaaS and cloud-based storage can do for your business is true — to a point. It’s often safer and cheaper to run cloud-based software applications than to use traditional, locally installed software.

However, no software is foolproof, and cloud vendors have no incentive to point out their vulnerabilities. That sounds obvious, but common sense is often left at ground level when companies start operating in the cloud.

Smart companies back up on-premise data. They do so because they don’t want to have a single point of failure for their irreplaceable information. That doesn’t stop being a good idea just because you move to the cloud.

The single biggest reason companies lost data before the era of cloud computing was hardware failure. A power supply overloaded, a motherboard shorted out or a hard drive crashed. Cloud vendors have legitimately solved this problem with massive, industrial-scale hardware redundancy. By copying your data onto several backup hard drives in several places, cloud vendors have made it nearly impossible for hardware failures to permanently destroy your information.

Google even goes so far as to promise the loss of an entire data center — as in the failure of an entire campus of buildings full of servers — won’t keep you away from your data for more than 24 hours. Hardware failure is a solved problem in the cloud.

However, Google can’t account for user error. Some good examples include someone permanently deleting a bunch of emails or accidentally writing over parts of this year’s sales spreadsheet with last year’s dat. No software program can tell the difference between intentional and unintentional commands, and not every action you take in the cloud has a quick undo command.

The cloud can save your business from unreliable hard drives. It can’t save you from yourself.