In today’s fast-paced, connected digital world, organizations need to be agile and ready for anything. Managing, backing up, and protecting the data they create plays a major part in preparation for the inevitable cyber attack. As a result, companies are increasingly choosing software as-a-sevice (SaaS) applications to boost productivity and collaboration, and drastically simplify the management of data created and stored within-platform. However, while the adoption of SaaS apps brings advantages to performing and automating business-critical processes, companies are quickly finding that SaaS data protection is equally important to safeguard sprawling, siloed data. By leveraging a SaaS approach to backing up and protecting data, organizations help reduce the risk of data loss, improve recoverability, and bolster their defense against cyber threats like ransomware.
Ransomware and cyber threats
While increasingly diverse and manipulative types of ransomware and other malware threats are on the rise, cloud data protection serves as a strategic defense mechanism for data and applications that are particularly vulnerable, including endpoints, cloud workloads, and SaaS applications like Microsoft 365. In a recent study, Aberdeen Group concluded that effective cloud backup and recovery offers the potential to reduce ransomware’s overall impact on an organization by more than 90%¹. This is particularly important as only 13% of companies experiencing an attack/breach reported not paying to recover their data², and the average ransom for hacked data rose to over $500,000 in 2021³.
Frequent data backups and testing of data restoration procedures are essential to surviving in the age of ransomware. Reliable automatic cloud backups and quick restoration from secure cloud-based storage are the most effective ways to minimize downtime and damage. A strong SaaS solution will actively scan backup data for signs of a ransomware attack, becoming an extra line of defense past your intrusion detection and prevention system. Should any attack get through, your data will be available in the cloud, accessible via the web.
Accidental deletion and human error
Estimates suggest human error could play a role in over 25% of data loss incidents⁴, and represent the main factor in up to 88% of cybersecurity breaches⁵. However, with SaaS data protection your team can be protected from… itself! Leading SaaS data protection and backup systems with zero-trust security frameworks ensures that all users are authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated prior to accessing apps and data. SaaS data protection also continuously creates copies of crucial data and keeps records of files at different points in time. Should data be accidentally deleted, IT can quickly leverage the cloud to recover only the specific files at risk. This saves time and money, and prevents potential losses.
Security, compliance, and legal obligations
Businesses can face serious, costly penalties if they are unable to produce data during litigation or a discovery request. eDiscovery requires legal teams have immediate access to potentially pertinent user data. Passage of recent legislation, such as GDPR, demonstrates an increasing need for data visibility. A comprehensive SaaS solution offers unified eDiscovery and can quickly identify correct data across multiple data sources such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, NAS systems, databases, and more. It should provide central visibility and federated data search, allowing users to easily place legal holds to resolve cases quickly and efficiently. The automated backup of user data, when combined with protection from mishandling or malicious actions, keeps the data readily accessible for legal teams.
100% SaaS — A modern approach to data protection
A SaaS-based data protection and resilience model provides secure, reliable software, in this case backing up created data with strong, breach-resistant architecture, and requires no additional hardware to invest in or manage. The SaaS vendor is responsible for maintaining its platform, updating its software, and managing end-user data for the customer. Customers cut costs and increase efficiency by not needing to purchase and install the software application themselves, and further save by letting the vendor handle the maintenance and troubleshooting. Convenience and cost-effectiveness are significant upsides to SaaS over a traditional on-premises approach.
In addition, SaaS greatly increases an organization’s cyber resilience by storing the data off-site, thus making it resistant to natural disasters or malicious actions. A SaaS approach also plays directly into the time-tested 3-2-1 rule of data protection, which states that for data to be truly secure it needs to be backed up in at least three separate copies, on at least two different mediums, one of which is located off-site.
IT leaders need to choose a SaaS data protection solution that not only meets essential storage and resilience criteria but proactively and automatically monitors compliance across all workloads.
Only a 100% SaaS solution like Druva provides the security, cost efficiency, and experience one should expect from an industry leader, and was recently recognized by Gartner as a “visionary” for its data protection platform, and by Forrester as “Leader” for SaaS app data protection.
Druva simplifies data protection across multiple clouds and workloads. It centralizes data protection with multi-tenant, integrated workflows for comprehensive backup, disaster recovery, archival, compliance, and analytics. This eliminates data silos and increases resilience without any hardware, software, or associated complexity. Druva empowers your IT team to:
- Drive security, data governance, and analytics initiatives, and leverage AI to transform your backup data into business intelligence.
- Enable eDiscovery and meet compliance mandates with best-in-class global deduplication, automated tiering, and archiving.
- Consolidate all workloads into a single control pane to reduce infrastructure and administrative overhead.
- Modernize data protection across data center, cloud workloads, SaaS apps, and the edge.
- Prevent and effectively minimize disruption from ransomware and cyber threats with unified backup and recovery.
Download the eBook, Why Companies are Migrating Data Protection to the Cloud for a closer look at how Druva modernizes data resilience in the age of ransomware.
¹ Aberdeen Research, “Reducing Impact of Ransomware Attacks via Cloud-based Approaches,” Published Mar. 2019. ² IDC, “IDC Survey Finds More Than One Third of Organizations Worldwide Have Experienced a Ransomware Attack or Breach,” Published Aug. 2021. ³ Palo Alto Networks, “Extortion Payments Hit New Records as Ransomware Crisis Intensifies,” Published Aug. 2021. ⁴ Steadfast, “Human Error Is The Leading Cause Of Business Data Loss,” Published June 2018. ⁵ KnowBe4, “New Stanford Research: 88% Of Data Breaches Are Caused By Human Error,” Published Mar. 2022.