18 Feb 2013
SaaS Data Loss: The Problem You Didn’t Know You Had
In January 2013, Aberdeen surveyed 123 organizations to learn how they use the Public Cloud as part of their IT infrastructure.
Some verbatim:
With the growing popularity of SaaS application usage, there is one issue that is not widely publicized — data loss. SaaS providers are quick to point out that their data is professionally backed up with the application spread over several geographically dispersed datacenters.
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While 68% of SaaS-users reported that they have never lost any of their data from an application, a full third (32%) reported that they had. Chart 3 shows the causes of the data loss. This portion of the chart will not total to 100% as those that lost data were allowed to report multiple causes.
The most common reason for SaaS data loss is end user deletion. This is easy to do; SaaS providers may provide multiple warnings about making sure the data changes are desired before the application is closed, but end users will still make mistakes. The second most common cause of data loss is where one employee over- writes a data element shared by others. The original employee may open the SaaS application to see that the data they entered and saved properly has been over-written by a later user.
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As the popularity of SaaS grows and larger enterprises adopt more SaaS solutions, we expect them to demand the same level of control and data protection for their SaaS deployments as they have for their on-premise applications. For mission critical applications, each and every data element needs complete protection. Whatever the solution, SaaS users must ensure that their critical business information is protected from both macro- and micro-disaster events.