Protecting SaaS Data from Breaches
Key Points
- SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Azure, and Google Workspace have become central to most organizations because they provide always‑up‑to‑date, globally accessible data that simplifies operations.
- The real risk isn’t just loss of individual files; a breach can jeopardize the entire IT infrastructure—including calendars, emails, invoices, and transactions—posing an existential threat to the business.
- A 2022 IBM survey of over 3,000 companies found that 86 % experienced malware attacks more than once in the prior year, with the average U.S. breach costing $9.4 million, underscoring the high financial stakes of inadequate SaaS data protection.
- Effective SaaS data‑protection solutions must tightly integrate with each workload and be able to back up data at a granular level, preserving custom fields, relationships, and the full application context.
Sections
- Protecting SaaS Data and Infrastructure - The speaker stresses that organizations using SaaS platforms must secure not just individual files but the entire underlying IT infrastructure, as calendars, emails, shared folders, and transaction records are critical to business operations.
- Key Requirements for SaaS Backups - The speaker outlines essential SaaS backup features, including granular data selection, flexible scheduling, customizable storage locations, and enhanced compliance and security.
Full Transcript
# Protecting SaaS Data from Breaches **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG1ng3vEVPU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG1ng3vEVPU) **Duration:** 00:05:28 ## Summary - SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Azure, and Google Workspace have become central to most organizations because they provide always‑up‑to‑date, globally accessible data that simplifies operations. - The real risk isn’t just loss of individual files; a breach can jeopardize the entire IT infrastructure—including calendars, emails, invoices, and transactions—posing an existential threat to the business. - A 2022 IBM survey of over 3,000 companies found that 86 % experienced malware attacks more than once in the prior year, with the average U.S. breach costing $9.4 million, underscoring the high financial stakes of inadequate SaaS data protection. - Effective SaaS data‑protection solutions must tightly integrate with each workload and be able to back up data at a granular level, preserving custom fields, relationships, and the full application context. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG1ng3vEVPU&t=0s) **Protecting SaaS Data and Infrastructure** - The speaker stresses that organizations using SaaS platforms must secure not just individual files but the entire underlying IT infrastructure, as calendars, emails, shared folders, and transaction records are critical to business operations. - [00:03:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG1ng3vEVPU&t=184s) **Key Requirements for SaaS Backups** - The speaker outlines essential SaaS backup features, including granular data selection, flexible scheduling, customizable storage locations, and enhanced compliance and security. ## Full Transcript
Does your organization use software as a service workloads?
Is the data in those workloads properly protected?
Let's look at this.
Today, most organizations have an IT infrastructure
that relies on software as a service, or SaaS, workloads.
Workloads like Microsoft 365,
Salesforce, Microsoft Azure, Google Workspace and many, many more.
There are good reasons why the software as a service model has taken off.
Primarily, it's because by putting all of the data into one location in the cloud,
where it's always up to date and can be accessed globally, even via mobile for your authorized users,
that has tremendous value and simplifies business operations.
But it's important to understand that when we're backing up this data,
it's more than just numbers and text.
"Data" seems a little bit vague, but let's look at what we're really concerned with here.
Let's say you have some data.
Well, another way of looking at this is you actually have IT infrastructure.
In your data center you've got a whole bunch of server racks with all kinds of storage and processes going on.
But what is really at threat is not just the data, it's the entire IT infrastructure.
And when you look at it, the data that's in that,
it's the calendars, emails, the shared folders, your customers, your invoices, your transactions -
they're really crucial parts of your organization's operations.
And so in a worst case scenario, we can imagine that what's really at threat here isn't just your data.
This is actually your entire organization facing an existential threat because of the loss of this data.
And this is what keeps your CIO or your CEO or your CISO, the Chief Information Security Officer, up at night, the constant risks.
What are these risks?
Well, to start with, they are so prevalent that now in the most recent survey that IBM did in August of 2022,
where they surveyed more than 3000 organizations to identify the cost of a data breach,
there were a couple of shocking numbers.
The first one was that 86% of companies
reported that they've been struck by malware more than once in the previous year.
More than once.
And in the United States, the average cost of one of those malware attacks was 9.4 million dollars.
So there are really significant costs associated here.
And what we need to do is look at how we can solve that problem
by beefing up the data protection part of your software as a service infrastructure.
So let's look at what capabilities you would need in a software as a service data protection solution.
Well, the first is, that if you're going to be protecting data from a specific workload,
it's really important that you have tight integration with that workload.
So when you want to look at backing up some data, you want the ability not to just backup an entire data set,
but to delve deeply into how the data is structured
and be able to capture the relationships, the custom fields and all of the other crucial data in that application.
Secondly, when you're doing backups, you really want greater control over when they occur.
Many SaaS platforms are limited in how often you can back up or how frequently or when you can back up.
You need to be able to set that automatically and according to your business requirements.
The next big issue is what is it that you're backing up?
Because rather than backing up the entire data set, which could take a long time and may not be necessary,
with good SaaS backup solutions,
you're able to specify down to the metadata level exactly what data it is that you want recovered.
Now the next key point is where are you going to store that data?
Well, the choice is between the platform that's provided by your SaaS provider
or whether you have choices to store it in your own cloud, private cloud, public cloud.
and that's a great flexibility that's really important to a lot of companies.
And then the final one is that good SaaS backup solutions
have enhanced compliance and security features, which are really important today.
So let's look at what the backup capability would need to include.
Well, we've seen that we need more frequent backups,
we need greater control over what those backups contain,
we need control where they're stored,
and we need to have increased security and compliance.
With all of these capabilities, I think we can really begin to address the bottom line.
And what is the bottom line here?
It really is the bottom line, the profit and loss statement for your company,
because this is not just about losing your data,
it's about losing your organization's ability to operate.
So if your company relies heavily on data in your SaaS workloads,
then SaaS backup software might be a good fit for your organization.
Thank you.
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