As the amount of SaaS data grows, so do the options for protecting it. Search for “backup and recovery” on the Salesforce AppExchange, and you'll get more than 20 results. And on G2, the largest software marketplace, the SaaS backup category yields 100+ listings.
However, despite the number of solutions on the market - and more being introduced constantly - Own’s position as a market leader remains unchanged. On the AppExchange, our customers have collectively submitted nearly 500 5-star reviews, more than every other solution combined. We are similarly positioned on G2, where we’ve been named a Leader (top quadrant) in our category for 12 consecutive quarters.
But we have the honor of being a market leader thanks only to our customers. Here are five of the reasons they tell us why they chose us over other solutions.
1. Own provides independent backups that are accessible even when your CRM isn't
One of the worst things that could happen to business continuity is for your SaaS application to experience a service disruption. That’s why the most important requirement of a backup solution is that it is independent of your production data.
During a service disruption, you wouldn’t be able to access a critical business application, and every user in your organization would be locked out for hours or even longer. You'd need to access your backup data to keep your business running. But what if those backups were held in the very place you are locked out of?
Time and again, customers have turned to Own because they place extreme value on having independent access to their data no matter what. Off-platform backups reduce the risk that a service disruption turns into a total business disruption and provides a haven should a ransomware attack occur, for example.
The separation of backups from the production system is a best practice that’s as well established as the discipline of performing backups itself and continues to be crucial in the age of SaaS. As Archana Venkatraman, Associate Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC Europe notes, "Having data in a different environment so that it's accessible and available when you need it, regardless of platform availability, is a fundamental requirement of safeguarding your SaaS data.”¹
From day one, Own has provided access to data, independent of your ability to log in to your SaaS application, enabling your organization to resume important work and ensure a measure of continuity, productivity, and the ability to serve customers.
For Flowserve, having this independent access to their Salesforce backups was a deciding factor in choosing Own. They needed Own and Salesforce to “act as separate heartbeats,” and it was therefore “fundamental that your backup be on a different platform than your production data.”
In addition to backup access, backup coverage is an essential attribute of whether your backups will be useful when you need them. It’s your responsibility to protect not just data but metadata as well. Errors with workflows, permissions, and reports can be just as disruptive to business as issues with your data.
Without metadata backups, you’ll need to manually re-construct elements of the Salesforce application, delaying the resumption of normal business operations. The ability to back up attachments and files is vital for the business operations of health care, financial services, manufacturing, and other industries.
Own backs up not just data but metadata, files, and attachments as well, ensuring that you can quickly recover from metadata loss or corruption that can disrupt the functioning of the application and your business. We automatically back up newly added objects as well, ensuring your backups stay complete as your application evolves.
2. Own offers fast and precise recovery
While backup and recovery is often thought of as a single solution, each is its own distinct process that comes with its own requirements and considerations. Of course, having a copy of your data is vital to meet the minimum standards of a backup. But the more significant challenge is restoring the data exactly how and when you need to.
Restoring lost or corrupted data is one of the most stressful situations a SaaS platform admin will face. While it’s important to do it quickly, you also must do it correctly, otherwise, you’ll make a bad situation worse. The problem is, restoring data correctly is hard. Data is complex, and loss and corruption mistakes can cascade either because of the relationships between objects or automations you've built that update and add data to the system.
Our customers value the unique capabilities of Own that guide them through the pressure of restoring data quickly and correctly.
For example, our Smart Alerts proactively notify you of changes to your data. Faster detection leads to faster data restoration and resumption of normal business operations. In addition, alerting criteria can be set on an object-by-object basis, so you’re notified when changes are out of the ordinary.
Smart Alerts were crucial for Listrak, who are deeply reliant on Salesforce. For example, shortly after Own went live, a Smart Alert notified Listrack admins about the sudden deletion of 400 accounts. The team quickly discovered the user at fault and put a better process in place to manage the cleaning of accounts.
Even when there are obvious indications that a problem exists though, the full scope of a data loss or corruption can be hard to pinpoint. You need to know the full and exact scope of unwanted changes to ensure your recovery is complete, and you could also harm your data by undoing desired changes.
To help with this, we provide visual graphs that help you quickly assess the breadth and scale of data changes across objects. With our Precision Repair capability, we also offer interactive tools like previews of changed field values and filters to help you zero in on unwanted changes. Once you’ve identified those unwanted changes, you can correct your data surgically and quickly, selecting a subset of records and fields to avoid undoing valid changes to data.
Certiport used Precision Repair when, during a mass data update, a subset of fields in a number of records were accidentally overwritten with the wrong data. Using Precision Repair, the team could quickly recover and fix only the corrupted records and fields, saving the team hours of work.
Finally, when your data is down, we know every minute counts. In addition to the self-service tools detailed above, Own customers appreciate having knowledgeable and certified support engineers they can call on during their moments of need. Our engineers have proven experience with a diverse range of real-world restores across thousands of customers. They are all admin-certified, making them experts not just in Own, but in SaaS data architecture as well. Finally, all our customers appreciate the responsiveness that comes from automatically defaulting every data loss or corruption case to the highest severity.
3. Own streamlines regulatory compliance
Our customers face an increasing number of regulations related to data management, and the capabilities of a backup solution determine whether or how easily they can comply with these regulations. Backups impact compliance in two important ways.
First, a number of industry-specific regulations stipulate requirements on how backups are performed and stored. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) affecting healthcare providers in the U.S. stipulates that exact copies of all electronic Protected Health Information (PHI) must be backed up regularly, encrypted, tested and stored offsite separately from the original data. For our healthcare customers, knowing that Own is HIPAA-compliant is crucial for them to leverage our solution. Other industry-specific regulations that have a direct bearing on backup requirements include GLBA and SEC 17a-4 in financial services. Our customers in these industries appreciate our ability to help them remain compliant.
Second, a growing number of data privacy regulations across the globe, such as GDPR require that companies comply with specific requirements around the handling of customers’ personal data. These include Subject Access Requests (SAR) that must respect customers’ requests to have their data rectified or purged. While many organizations have put in place processes and tools to handle these requests in production systems, customer personal data is also stored in backups. Relying on manual processes to purge or rectify data in backups increases the risk of errors, non-compliance and, ultimately, fines. It also adds to the workload for admin and privacy teams that are already stretched thin.
Own helps customers be more efficient and accurate in complying with data privacy regulations by providing built-in tools to locate and update records. Walter Scott is an example of one of our customers who chose Own because of these tools. The company was comfortable that they could efficiently respond to Subject Access Requests (SARs) within their live Salesforce instance. However, they weren’t certain that they would be able to respond to such requests within their backups without a great deal of manual effort.
With Own, Walter Scott easily searched their backups to find Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and swiftly respond to Subject Access Requests. According to Leigh Etienne, Senior IT Manager at Walter Scott, "The beauty of Own is that we retain control over the searching, locating, and anonymization of data where required. It took minutes to implement and is so easy to use. We now have confidence that we can respond to any GDPR or restore queries accurately and quickly with Own in place."
4. Own is the most complete solution for data management
As your use of SaaS applications grows and expands, the data in these applications will get larger and more complex. If you are not taking advantage of the breadth of business processes and ecosystem solutions supported by these SaaS platforms, you are likely underutilizing their potential to transform your business.
A backup and recovery solution addresses the first and most pressing challenge created by the growth in volume and complexity of SaaS data. With your dependence on your SaaS application growing, the urgency to protect yourself from an inability to use that data also grows - whether that inability to use data stems from a service disruption, a data loss or corruption caused by faulty integrations, incorrect code, or just plain human error.
But there are many more challenges that our customers have faced as their data has grown in volume and complexity, which we’ve helped them conquer as well, thanks to the breadth of our data management solution.
Other challenges from growing data volumes include:
- The need for more storage capacity, which leads to increased costs and overage fees
- Increased risk surface as more data stays exposed to potential misuse
- A degradation in the responsiveness of SaaS applications as screens take longer to load or reports and dashboards take longer to run
Deleting data can be a tempting quick fix to these volume-driven challenges, but deletion brings an entirely different set of challenges. It can be difficult for the organization to decide exactly what data is no longer permanently needed, and business leadership is often hesitant to lose any data whatsoever. Even if a decision is made, it can be technically daunting to ensure just the right data is deleted and that deletion complies with retention requirements.
“Right-sizing” the data in your SaaS application is not an easy challenge to solve, which is why many of our customers value having Own Archive working alongside Own Recover, our backup and recovery solution. Own Archive is an automated archiving solution that helps our customers easily relocate old or obsolete data from their production orgs without ever losing access to it. In addition, Archive allows them to manage their data as it moves through the data lifecycle by defining custom archiving policies that include what specific data to store, how often to archive data, and how long to retain the data.
Increasing use of SaaS applications also brings additional challenges beyond managing the volume of data. Many of our customers also experience growth in the number and type of users accessing data in SaaS applications, and keeping data secure becomes a more pressing challenge as well. In addition, growth in business units and departments using the SaaS application makes it more difficult to ensure that users see only the data they should. While many SaaS applications come with powerful security controls, they can be complex to configure. In fact, the regular security risk assessments we run on Salesforce orgs indicate that, on average, 84% of Salesforce users have access to sensitive information.
To address the challenges of keeping data secure, many Own customers also leverage Own Secure to isolate exactly where sensitive information exists in Salesforce and then classify it so they can prioritize its safeguarding. They also use Secure to stop Salesforce configuration creep with granular “Who Sees What” lenses, and trace individual, group, or guest access rights down to the record level.
As development work on SaaS platforms expands, it’s also essential to ensure that developers using non-production environments like sandboxes are prevented from seeing sensitive data. Because data in lower environments is a subset of production data, it’s likely to contain confidential information that many people could access during development, testing, and training. To protect the data in these environments, Own customers leverage Own Accelerate to anonymize data as it’s seeded in an automated fashion.
As you can see, our vision to support our customers extends beyond just the backup and recovery aspect of data management, and into a range of solutions that address the full scope of data challenges that arise as customers rely more and more on SaaS applications - challenges that include data archiving, data security and data seeding. Our vision extends beyond Salesforce data with SaaS data protection solutions that also offer coverage for ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
5. Own is a proven solution and has a focused commitment to data protection
With data being so crucial to your business, you need a data protection partner that’s been there before. Of course, every company positions itself as the best in the market or the most experienced. But can they back it up? (pun intended).
No one has more experience or expertise when protecting SaaS data than Own. For more than eight years, we’ve had a single-minded focus on protecting data - there’s nothing more important to us.
Between the AppExchange and G2, we have over 700 reviews that are overwhelmingly 5 stars. Most of those reviews reference our support team, whose sole focus is data protection. Our customers also appreciate the same focus regarding our Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and Technical Account Managers. They are asked to support only one product so they can devote their full attention and expertise to our customer's specific data protection product needs.
For our customers, that attention and expertise mean we’ve likely seen every data loss scenario and know how to resolve it. Every customer is unique, and it takes years to fine-tune the solutions that can address all the different recovery scenarios. We are a proven solution that’s come to the rescue in thousands of scenarios that customers have faced, and we treat data loss or corruption with the same urgency felt by our customers.
“…The level of customer service is absolutely superb. While faced with massive and complex data loss and corruption issues, they calmly helped walk us through the process to restore the damaged data…”
- 5-star Salesforce AppExchange review from Collin McNamara, a Business Operations Manager
Throughout this post, we’ve included examples from several of our customers. But this statement from Will Kennimer at VensureHR might sum up the value of relying on a proven solution best, “It actually does what I was told it was going to do. And how silly is it that I have to make that comment? Unfortunately, that’s not my typical experience with other systems I’ve worked with.”
So, why will you choose Own?
Now that you know why other companies have chosen to protect their data with Own, why will you? To experience Own for yourself, check out a demo below.
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