There are limitations with all SaaS providers their focus is on infrastructure - ensuring uptime, availability, basic retention as well as physical and logical security, while the data owner is responsible for data security, privacy, compliance and recovery. As mentioned above the major SaaS providers provide basic replication and recycle bin features for limited short time data loss recovery.
Data loss and security breaches are the major concern for SaaS users, O365 for example is no exception to security breaches, it is vulnerable to internal threats i.e. accidental deletion of data, actions by disgruntled staff, as well as malware or ransomware. The general opinion is that almost 70% of organisations suffer some form of cyber security breach each year, and almost 50% of organisations have suffered from an unrecoverable data event in the past three years. We can definitely confirm that this is case especially within private sector organisations. In terms of general data loss, we haven't seen a major data loss event from any of the major SaaS providers as yet, the reality is that this can happen; when this does happen as it surely will, you need to be in a position to recover your mailboxes and data.
Compliance/GDPR is another concern for SaaS users and understanding the responsibilities schools have in relation to the data that they hold and how long they should hold it for, this we believe, along with cyber security will be the main reasons schools should look to have a robust backup solution in place as part of their data security, compliance and organisational continuity plan. Access to mailboxes and data after staff have moved on from organisations will become critical to satisfy any personal data requests as well as having another copy of your data rather than a single copy held by an individual SaaS provider ensures you can avoid SaaS lock-in.
Our Cloud Backup solution protects physical and virtual workloads on premise as well as SaaS (0365), we generally provide daily backups with 14 incrementals (restore) points, monthly and annual backups can also be provided. Ths solution is flexible and enables us to provide the correct solution for each individual requirement. The case for backing up on premise systems is well understood whereas why you should be backing up SaaS products such as 0365 is still causing confusion Compliance, cyber security and the risk of data loss is why in our opinion it is critical to protect your SaaS data.
