Backup is back. What once was old is now new and cool.
Flannel shirts, acid-washed jeans, Polaroid cameras, and vinyl records—these items which were once out of style are now emerging as popular must-haves among the younger generation.
In the realm of IT, data backup has always been a necessity. Initially, it represented a compelling concept—storing data in an alternate location to ensure redundancy and failover capabilities in preparation for natural disasters. Subsequently, despite its significant evolution, it lost its allure, transforming into an obligatory task.
The advent of SaaS saw data backup plummet further on the "coolness" scale, primarily due to organizations deeming it unnecessary, consequently neglecting it.
However, one aspect frequently overlooked is the Shared Responsibility Model, which articulates the distinctions in responsibilities between SaaS providers and users. Essentially, users bear the ownership of the data and are therefore accountable for its backup and protection.
For years, it is believed that SaaS backup failed to gain traction due to the lack of awareness surrounding the Shared Responsibility Model. Nevertheless, the landscape has shifted.
Don’t take my word for it, look at what some of the major SaaS providers are doing. Microsoft recently unveiled Microsoft M365 Backup Storage in late July, and this month, Salesforce announced the acquisition of Own Company. We believe this signals that SaaS app providers are acknowledging the critical need to protect SaaS applications.
These strategic investments aim to address the escalating challenges of data loss resulting from cyberattacks and human errors. Specifically, SaaS attacks have witnessed an exponential surge, and by 2028, Gartner forecasts that 75% of large organizations will prioritize SaaS backup, a substantial increase from the current 15%.
The urgency of SaaS backup creates a challenge though. The management of individual backup applications for distinct SaaS solutions introduces complexities and overheads pertaining to data visibility and security. Even after the implementation of first-party tools, the issue of ownership and responsibility for data restoration, if the need arises, can be uncertain.
This predicament mirrors the archaic, uncool data center backup approach, one that database administrators and server administrators confronted in years past. Let’s not go backwards!
Looks like backup is back but it isn’t the whole story. What they aren’t talking about and what these first party products aren’t accounting for is data exfiltration, the number one goal of a threat actor.
To stay ahead of the bad guys, we need to know where critical data is, who has access to it and what they are doing with it. Not just within SaaS but across the entire data estate. The bad guys might break in, but how do we begin to address these questions?
What was impacted?
Do we need to recover?
If we need to recover, where do we recover?
What is the impact of the recovery?
How long will it take?
Just backing up data doesn’t give us these answers.
So where do we go from here? It's clear that things have changed and that we have to take a more unified approach to our cyber security and recovery strategies. The way forward is a unified approach, with a single platform that manages all of your data across Data Center, Cloud and SaaS, that delivers robust security operators to help solve for evolving cyber threats, with powerful posture management capabilities to understand the users of your data. Now that’s cool.
Ready to protect your data the right way?
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