Data Recovery Comes into Focus as SaaS Adoption Ramps Up

SaaS use is on the rise through the increasing popularity of applications including Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, and Salesforce.com, causing companies using these services to examine the issue of data protection to prevent data loss.

That’s the word from Asigra, the cloud backup, recovery and restore software provider, which has put together a compendium of market stats as evidence of this trend. Channel partners, it should be noted, have a clear opportunity to recommend backup services within their cloud sales.

For instance, the firm pointed out that Odin’s fifth annual U.S. SMB Cloud Insights report forecasts that the cloud services market for small and medium business (SMB) will expand at an 11.4 percent CAGR over the next three years, and is predicted to reach $34.9 billion by 2018.

“Over the five years that we have been conducting this study, we’ve seen a rapid and consistent growth in SMB consumption of cloud services,” saidd Odin’s CEO Birger Steen. “Applications and capabilities that were previously reserved for enterprise-size organizations are now benefiting millions of smaller businesses.”

Additionally, through the first three quarters of fiscal 2015, Microsoft reported that its Commercial Office 365 user base rose 10 points since last year, supporting commercial cloud revenue growth of 106 percent. And according to Google’s senior vice president and chief Business officer Nikesh Arora, more than half of all Fortune 500 companies now use Google Apps for Business and the company’s enterprise products. Arora recently told Talkin’ Cloud that more than 5 million businesses use Google’s productivity apps. In the article, reporter Joe Panettieri also noted that “Microsoft and Google are saying the same exact thing about their Fortune 500 penetration,” since during an earnings call, Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood said over 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Azure, and Office 365 now boasts a $1.5 billion annual run rate.

Despite this increased usage in cloud-based business productivity suites, however, most SaaS apps offer very limited data recovery capabilities in the event of data loss. Customers are growing increasingly concerned about these clear limitations, as evidenced by discussions on the topic in Microsoft Office 365’s community forums, where users share disappointing experiences of losing data and needing to do their own backups.

With the industry forecasting continued growth of SaaS use, businesses need to take extra precautions to protect their important data against potential loss due to accidental or malicious deletion.

“As cloud adoption continues to grow, there will be ongoing unreported data loss events inside these environments. Even with secure SaaS applications, it is still the customer’s responsibility to backup that information to ensure its recovery,” said Eran Farajun, EVP at Asigra. “Asigra cloud-to-cloud backup capabilities include the support for Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, and Salesforce.com. Organizations seeking to prevent the unfortunate loss of data from these key SaaS applications have an ally in this effort with Asigra.”