Data Privacy Day: Niels van Ingen, Chief Customer Officer for Keepit

Niels van Ingen, Chief Customer Officer for Keepit

No one likes surprises, particularly IT executives who believe their SaaS cloud providers have taken all the necessary steps to back up customers’ critical enterprise data. This is never truer when a disaster strikes, whether from an internal mistake or an attack from the outside, leaving business operations at a complete standstill.

The unfortunate truth is that most SaaS providers don’t offer the necessary level of data backup and recovery that enterprises require to get back up and running.

And guess what? If you read the cloud agreement, you’ll discover SaaS vendors aren’t responsible for data backup. The onus is on you.

It’s easy for individuals and businesses using popular cloud-based services to believe their data is “backed up in the cloud” and easily retrievable in the event of an attack or accidental deletion. However, they quickly learn – often too late – that backup services from SaaS vendors are usually very limited, disorganized, or prohibitively expensive to access. Organizations also get surprised when learning that many SaaS providers offer a limited data retention period, where after such time, the data is permanently deleted.

That’s why the only true backup – and the last line of defense in SaaS data protection – is having granular, reliable, and fast backup and recovery capabilities, with the data stored separate from the SaaS vendor’s environment.