Five “must-haves” for a SaaS backup solution

The use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions has been on the rise for the past few years, even before we all started working remotely – adoption has, understandably, increased faster in 2020.

There are many reasons why enterprises are choosing SaaS solutions like Microsoft 365, Google Drive, Slack, and Box, among others. Among those reasons are cost savings, ease of deployment, simplified purchasing processes, simple support for remote users, and a huge reduction in the amount of time spent managing the applications and their infrastructure.

A direct effect of SaaS adoption is that your data is no longer stored in your own data center, but is, instead, stored by the SaaS provider. Many SaaS providers use end-to-end encryption as a part of their solution, so enterprises have the reassurance that their data in being kept secure. The question then is: how is that data protected?

Many folks use “protection” and “security” as meaning the same thing. In this case, I’m using “security” to mean that which keeps your data from being stolen or even viewed by anyone who you haven’t approved in advance; I’m using “protection” to mean that which keeps your data from being lost, either by accidental or malicious deletion or by malware.

Many SaaS providers offer some form of data protection – often as an add-on service that customers pay for. Enterprises that have recognized that their data is the lifeblood of their organization – they would not be able to continue operating if that data were lost – consider data protection to be a necessity/. Most SaaS offerings don’t protect customer data at a level that allows the people who depend on that data to sleep easily, confident that the data is safe.

Because of this, many organizations are looking to SaaS backup solutions from someone other than their SaaS provider. Veritas believes that your backups aren’t truly yours unless you own a copy of the data on a separate platform that you control. This has led to our spending a lot of effort to ensure that our backup and archive solutions offer enterprises everything they need so that everyone can sleep easily.

When your organization is considering a SaaS backup solution, there are five core foundational aspects that you should ensure are built-in to any SaaS backup solution before you even engage in a conversation with the backup provider. Those requirements are:

1. Full coverage – you don’t want to resort to multiple single-purpose or limited solutions. You want your backup and archive solution to cover all your SaaS applications.
2. Flexible recovery – it’s your data – you should be able to recover it to wherever you want. You want to be able to easily recover data to its original location, a separate location that you specify, or packaged for easy export.
3. Performance and scalability – a solution that can’t keep up with your volume of data and rate of data change is not a workable solution for you.
4. Automatic compliance enforcement – enterprises have regulations regarding their data that they must comply with – often several different regulations from different nations. You need a solution that allows you to set your compliance criteria and then provides that compliance for your backup and archive data as it is ingested.
5. A single, unified management console – enterprises often have multiple locations around the globe, and no one wants to be forced to use separate management tools per location or per SaaS solution. Being able to manage everything from a single browser-based console simplifies standardizing policies across all business units and locations.

In addition to those five requirements, there are some additional features you want to take into consideration, like data security, continuous data protection (CDP) and journaling, and simple archiving of former employees’ data.

That’s a lot of things to keep in mind while evaluating SaaS backup and archive solutions. To help you out, we’ve created a solution brief that covers all the requirements and features discussed above in greater depth.

Veritas’s cloud data management platform provides a Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Archive-as-a-Service (AaaS) for SaaS applications, including all aspects of your email solution, your file collections, and your messaging platform.

If you’d like more information, download the solution brief or reach out to us with any questions.