The first issue organizations made do with when it comes to backup for SaaS applications is a lack of options for most applications. Due to a lack of standards, SaaS backup vendors are now focused to develop completely custom solutions for each application.
In this regard, most vendors tend to support a handful of widely leveraged platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Salesforce. Until this issue is addressed, backup support will continue to be limited to the most widely used applications.
For any application that is supported, there are a few capabilities that organizations should consider when examining different SaaS backup solutions. Can you restore individual items? For instance, can you restore a single file in a Microsoft OneDrive folder, or do you have to restore the entire folder?
It doesn’t end at that since you should also factor in item relationships. Keep in mind many SaaS applications tend to combine unstructured data such as files with structured data in databases or have complex relationships between different records in a database. To be useful, the SaaS backup application must understand the relationship between different data items and be able to accurately restore them.
As organizations continue keeping more and more data in SaaS apps, the speed of backup and recovery operations becomes increasingly essential. For SaaS backup vendors, this can be particularly challenging considering the SaaS vendor often throttle access to backup-related interfaces making it difficult to guarantee performance. However, some SaaS backup vendors are better than others in overcoming these limitations.
The best thing about investing in a SaaS backup solution is that it helps protect against data loss. It is worth mentioning that SaaS data loss can happen for various reasons. For instance, your team members may accidentally delete data from systems and apps. Not to mention SaaS providers tend to experience technical issues that cause data loss.
SaaS backups help improve data protection by backing up data at regular intervals to secure storage like immutable, air-gapped storage so hackers can’t access it. No wonder you can never risk skimping on what a SaaS backup solution offers your organization.
