Posted by Tracy Staniland
Last week was not a good week for Salesforce.com or for its customers. The data loss experienced last week is tragic; however, it validates why companies of all sizes need to ensure that they have a data protection strategy in place for data born and stored in any part of the cloud.
Whether corporate data resides in Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, AWS, Azure or another cloud source, companies need to remember that they bear the corporate responsibility to ensure the data is protected to meet their Recovery Time Objectives and compliance mandates.
Sadly for Salesforce.com customers, this is not the first data loss instance and likely not the last. For customers who are relying on the SaaS vendor to provide comprehensive data protection, it’s time to rethink that strategy and get serious about data protection.
Companies need to remember that SaaS vendors such as Salesforce.com charge per recovery if a data recovery is required. For example, with Salesforce.com, after 15 days, records sent to the Recycle Bin can only be recovered with the help of support at a cost of $10,000.00 per recovery. And after 90 days, records sent to the Recycle Bin are unrecoverable; and restores, where possible, are ‘all or nothing’ meaning you could end up with a large and confusing quantity of files in a user’s account. Office 365 and Google Apps have similar policies whereby after a specific number of days the data restores may not be possible.
Not only do companies need to think about what they are doing to protect the data in these SaaS-based applications, but if they are outsourcing their IT to Managed Service Providers (MSP), the MSP bears a responsibility as a trusted advisor to provide guidance to their customers on how to protect this data, which may be the lifeblood of the company – its critical customer data.
As Eran Farajun, executive vice president, Asigra stated in an interview with CRN editor Joseph Tsidulko last week, “This should remind [the channel] that if you're selling a SaaS application and that data just sits there, you don’t absolve yourself of the responsibility of [protecting] your customers, to ensure the data management processes that the customer was doing for data when it was sitting on-prem are extended to the data sitting now in a SaaS vendor's cloud.”
SaaS data loss can be prevented. For more information on cloud-to-cloud backup strategies, please contact us today.