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Is Data In Your SaaS Application Safe?

Given the the news of a major outage at Salesforce over the last few days many application owners and IT staff may be scrambling to check what is and what isn't backed up.

Now there is no suggestion at this time that any data has been lost - see here for details on the latest outage. This however isn't the first time that there has been issues, this article from 2016 highlights that SaaS applications are not the safe haven for data that many think.

When researching Salesforce's own recommendations we find the following "we recommend that you use a partner backup solution". Salesforce will run a restore for you if you absolutely require it but it comes at a price, a flat $10,000 restore fee. Not only that but you can only go back 90 days and data is restored as a CSV with no metadata restored and the whole process takes 6-8 weeks.

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NetApp SaaS Backup Offers Automated Backup and Instant Recovery of O365 and Salesforce

O365 users too should be backing up data, Microsoft will do everything they can to ensure they can recover your data should they screw up however they have limited options for protecting against end user mistakes or malicious events that impact your data.

These limited options include backups of SharePoint and OneDrive every 12 hours for 14 days as well as 30 day recovery of files. For Exchange Online you could use litigation hold but realistically this is a retention flag which can be disabled by an admin and recovery is slow and complex whilst not preserving folder structure.

And with the Aberdeen Group finding that 47% of all SaaS data loss caused by end user deletion and further losses from employee overwrites and malicious deletes you should be looking at an enterprise data protection strategy for all of your SaaS applications.

Fortunately there are many 3rd party options out there to automate backups for your SaaS applications. NetApp SaaS Backup is a cloud native SaaS offering which can be configured in 5 minutes, requires no patching, scaling or customer infrastructure resulting in a lower TCO than traditional self-managed solutions.

For more information on the above and to sign up for a free trial of NetApp's SaaS Backup click here.

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About Mike Andrews
Manchester, England Website
Senior System Engineer currently working at Cohesity focussed on Data Management. I have a keen interest in cloud and have worked in the IT industry for 13 years. My views are my own.