If there’s one thing that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon’s recent earnings reports made plain, it’s that their cloud businesses are flourishing. While the cloud migration is well underway, many businesses are overlooking a crucial part of this expansion: the massive rise of data created by SaaS that is not appropriately safeguarded. Companies may be more vulnerable to ransomware attacks, data breaches, compliance issues, and other threats as a result of this vulnerability.
Enterprise SaaS is exploding, and it’s just going to become bigger. End-user expenditure on SaaS is expected to increase by over 18% to $171.9 billion in 2022 from $145.5 billion in 2021, according to Gartner, and it’s simple to understand why. Both service providers and users benefit from the SaaS model, which includes lower prices and easier management and maintenance. The advantages of SaaS are numerous: It eliminates the need to install and configure software; it provides greater financial flexibility to customers by shifting from licensing costs to subscriptions; it eliminates the need to acquire and maintain hardware; and it automatically deploys new versions and updates.
Organizations typically have limited visibility into what SaaS data they truly have, whether that data is in compliance, safeguarded, or hacked, without the correct controls in place. However, despite its fast expansion and numerous advantages, maintaining and safeguarding SaaS data poses considerable issues. That’s an issue that’s only going to become worse, since SaaS is the fastest-growing section of many companies’ data.
The default retention rules of cloud providers are insufficient. Each cloud service provider (CSP) and software as a service (SaaS) has its own data retention policy, and after it expires, the client is responsible for backing up, safeguarding, and, if necessary, recovering the data in the case of a cyber-attack. The client is not only accountable, but data retention regulations vary depending on the supplier and the kind of SaaS data.
In today’s era of frequent ransomware attacks and strict privacy and compliance rules, few businesses can afford to leave data unmanaged and exposed. As an example, consider Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 has seen amazing growth in the last two years, with approximately 300 million users and a 50 percent increase in subscribers. Despite being one of the most popular business SaaS apps, backup solutions for data stored on Azure are limited.
