Software-as-a-Service offerings are tremendously popular and are a great way that organizations today begin migrating business-critical applications to the cloud. Software-as-a-Service or SaaS offerings generally include such applications as organization email, file storage, SharePoint, messaging and other types of applications. Two of the big-name cloud vendors, notably Microsoft’s Office 365 offering and Google’s G Suite SaaS offerings are two of the most popular public cloud SaaS vendors in the market today. Both of these two services, Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite, provide great platforms for organizations to begin migrating architecture and services to public cloud environments. Both Microsoft and Google provide many great resources and tools to help streamline this process for organizations looking to make the switch to public cloud SaaS offerings for the above-mentioned services. One of the critical aspects of SaaS for organizations is the realization that providing data protection, as soon as data hits these environments, is absolutely critical.
In this post, we will take a look at mistakes to avoid with Software-as-a-Service SaaS backups and how businesses avoid pitfalls of making sure they have properly protected these very popular environments for running these types of business-critical applications.
Common Software-as-a-Service SaaS Backup Mistakes to Avoid
There are many different aspects to any data protection strategy when looking at both on-premises environments as well as the public cloud. There are often mistakes that are made when provisioning a data protection strategy for protecting SaaS environments. There are definitely key areas of designing any SaaS data protection strategy that need to be taken into consideration.
In this post, we will examine the following areas to see why each of these are important when protecting SaaS environments as well as how each of these challenges can be overcome with the right SaaS data protection solution.
Mistakes
- Failing to backup SaaS environments
- No versioned backups
- Having no Retention Policy
- Neglecting SaaS backup security
- Depending on the same cloud for backups
Let’s take a look at each of these and see why they are crucially important when thinking about backing up SaaS environments.
Failing to Backup SaaS Environments
Many organizations when migrating to the public cloud by utilizing services such as Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite may rationalize that these are “hyperscale” vendors that have resiliency that is unmatched. Many might say they “would never lose data on this type of infrastructure”. This type of stance however on public cloud infrastructure and organization data can lead to serious data loss for potentially business-critical resources such as public cloud file storage and email.
Businesses who are unfamiliar with SaaS offerings and haven’t fully thought through data protection for public cloud resources, often confuse and equate the high-availability of public cloud SaaS environments such as Office 365 and G Suite with data recovery.
However, this is simply not the case.
Even if data is available with hyperscale mechanisms, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be deleted. The same types of end user mistakes and intentional actions can lead to data disaster, even in these ultra-resilient, hyperscale environments. Additionally, think about the damage that ransomware can inflict on on-premises environments. This same kind of damage can be inflicted on cloud environments as well, such as cloud storage and even email. Without protecting these environments with some type of data protection solution, there is the potential for data loss and corruption as a result of these types of threats.
The conclusion is simple. Organizations must protect their SaaS environments with some type of data protection solution so that these environments can be recovered in case of a data loss disaster event. This is “mistake #1” that many have made and that has led to disastrous results. By protecting SaaS environments, organizations can be confident of the data stored in these SaaS environments, even if they suffer data loss as a result of end users or ransomware.
No Backup Versioning
Having multiple versions of files stored in the SaaS environment is extremely important. While having at least one version as a backup of data stored in these SaaS environments is certainly better than no backups, having at least a few days’ worth of multiple file and email versions is extremely critical in production cloud environments.
Why are multiple versions of files and email important in regards to cloud SaaS offerings?
Think about this.
If ransomware encrypts a file on-premises and then the file is synchronized to the public cloud via a synchronization tool installed on a workstation, to the public cloud environment, this simply is a new change to the file. If you are only keeping one copy of files or emails stored in the cloud, what happens if you have all your files encrypted by ransomware, the backup solution backs up the files that are now encrypted and replaces the good version of the file that previously existed? You are now in a disastrous situation of having backed up only the corrupted, encrypted versions of the files in the public cloud.
Having effective, multiple versions of files and emails stored in public cloud SaaS offerings is extremely important and is key to having a well-designed and architected backup solution. By storing multiple versions, you can then pick a version of the file or email previous to when the ransomware or other data loss event occurred and successfully restore the file to a known-good state.
Having No Retention Policy
Retention policies are extremely important when thinking about the overall disaster recovery footprint and design. Retention policies basically say how many “versions” of backups are stored on disk or in the cloud by the data protection solution. While versioning, as mentioned in the previous section, is extremely important, organizations need to think about how many versions or data recovery points make sense for the particular data in question.
Retention policies will most likely be different for every organization, as these are typically driven by the business needs and SLAs as decided upon for recovering data. Typically, most organizations are only interested in restoring the latest version of a file or email if disaster strikes. However, there may be reasons to keep around a much longer set of data that can readily be restored for various business purposes.
Deciding on a retention policy will generally require the buy-in of business leaders but is important to ensure that organizations have the proper number of recovery points available for data to be restored, effectively and efficiently. Additionally, it also ensures that backup storage or cloud storage is being utilized as efficiently as possible. There will generally be a happy medium of restore points vs. amount of backup storage available to provide the right metrics to make this decision.
Neglecting SaaS Backup Security
Failing to take security into account with any business process or objective in today’s world is a serious mistake that businesses often do not recover from. Security sometime is not thought about as much in the realm of disaster recovery or data protection.
However, when you think about what backup data really is – production data stored in a separate location, it becomes readily apparent that security needs to be taken into consideration. The same sensitive or important information in production resides on the backup storage. Attackers know this and often can target backup data as a less guarded, and less secure target for obtaining production/sensitive data.
To properly protect backup data that is traversing the wire and that is being stored on disk or in the cloud, backups need to be encrypted both in-flight and at-rest. This means, the data is encrypted when it is being transferred across the network, and when it is sitting in backup storage repositories.
It is critically important to protect backup data using these types of security mechanisms so that data cannot be snooped when moving across the network or stolen from backup data repositories. The in-flight and at-rest encryption mechanisms help to ensure the protection and security of both aspects of the backup process.
Depending on the Same Cloud for Backups
Another aspect of a well-designed SaaS backup strategy is thinking about where the backup data is going to be stored. Much of what the 3-2-1 backup design best practice methodology is based on keeping multiple copies of backup data in different locations. When thinking about backing up Microsoft Office 365 or Google G Suite environments, it would not be the best idea to store backups of Microsoft’s public cloud environment in Microsoft public cloud storage. Similarly, storing Google G Suite data in Google Cloud Storage may not be the best idea either.
Diversifying your SaaS backup data by avoiding storing it in the same public cloud storage as you are backing up, helps to ensure that you have access to your backup data, even if the public cloud you are backing up is not available. Even though public cloud vendors have hyperscale environments that are ultra-resilient, they have been known to have issues from time to time. Using a backup solution that allows storing data outside these two SaaS public clouds allows effectively diversifying data locations of production vs. backup storage.
Vembu SaaSBackup
Vembu SaaSBackup allows backing up today’s most popular Saas solutions – Office 365 and G Suite environments. It helps organizations to meet all the demands of best practice SaaS backup considerations and avoiding the mistakes that have been listed in this post.
Highlights of Vembu SaaSBackup include:
- Agentless Office 365 and Google G Suite Backups
- Hosted in Secure Amazon AWS cloud
- Encrypted in-flight and at-rest with AES 256-bit encryption technology
- Easy to manage user-friendly interface
- Extensive reporting to keep you informed about SaaS backup jobs
Vembu SaaSBackup allows unlocking the potential for powerful, effective, efficient, secure, and data-diverse SaaS backups for your public cloud environment. This allows confidently and safely migrating these types of on-premises services to the public cloud.
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