The 451 Take
The need for cloud backup
The companies providing these applications tend to offer basic levels of retention that varies from company to
Protecting Salesforce data is a different challenge than more generalized document storage because its services are based on a proprietary application environment that can be heavily modified by its customers. This requires the protection of both configuration data and application
Q. What is your organization's primary data protection strategy for SaaS applications?
Source: 451 Research, Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Budgets and Outlook 2017
There are a number of threats that could easily result in data loss for these applications, including errors in data migration, accidental deletion of files, insider threats or applications unintentionally mismanaging data. Human error is the crux of many of these risks. Data recovery windows average about 30 days, so customers are faced with a relatively short time frame with which to detect and take action against accidental deletions or mismanagement of data.
Cloud-to-cloud backup is one method for protecting data from this kind of loss. However, only 10.8% of respondents are using a cloud-to-cloud backup application, although there are a number of vendors competing for the opportunity in this space. These products offer the ability to automate the backup of data from a SaaS provider to a given public cloud, like AWS S3 or Microsoft Azure, not only to protect it from
Vendors in the SaaS data-protection space
In the market, there are storage vendors offering cloud-to-cloud backup as part of their larger portfolios, as well as vendors that focus more exclusively on this use case. Typically, these offerings are catering to the most prominent SaaS applications, the previously mentioned Google G Suite, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce, although some also target Box, Dropbox, Evernote and other similar file sync/share services.
A number of vendors are active in the SaaS data protection space. Acronis offers backup protection for Office 365 mailboxes, individual emails, calendar tasks and contacts. Online backup pioneer Asigra has been doing SaaS backup for a few years
There are a number of other players in the market, including Barracuda Networks, Carbonite, CloudAlly, Cloudfinder, CloudHQ, Druva, Metalogix Software, SkyKick, StorageCraft
Henry Baltazar is a Research Director for the Storage Channel at 451 Research. Henry returned to 451 Research after spending nearly three years at Forrester Research as a senior analyst serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals and advising Forrester clients on
Steven Hill is a Senior Analyst of Storage technologies. He covers the latest generation of
As a Senior Research Associate in 451 Research’s Storage Channel, Liam Rogers covers technology and business-model innovation across the enterprise storage landscape – spanning primary storage systems and software, backup and recovery, archiving, cloud storage services, cloud-enabling storage technologies