“We have not started doing our own backups outside of what the SaaS provider is contracted to do, although I would say it is a growing consideration,” Bell says. “As I look at our recovery capabilities, one area of growing concern is our critical SaaS applications. In a supply-chain scenario, our third parties may be the reason we aren’t backed up. An extra layer of redundancy may become critical.”
Integrating backup-as-a-service solutions is necessary for protecting workloads stored on the cloud and ensuring operational continuity, Gartner maintains. Although some SaaS providers offer basic backup services at no to little cost, CIOs are exploring more comprehensive ways to protect their data assets in SaaS and ensure they have a disaster recovery method ready to go should their SaaS solutions fail, Gartner analysts claim.
“Not every SaaS has backup capabilities for their own product, and with many of the ones that do, those native backup capabilities are rudimentary,” says Johnny Yu, who leads IDC’s SaaS backup research. “Salesforce has some sort of rudimentary backup feature as well, though I don’t believe they charge extra for it.”
