We’ve come a long way from the 1990s and early aughts when on-premise systems were at the heart of business. Today, cloud-based software-as-service (SaaS) solutions like Salesforce are the norm and mission-critical for most users. And it’s easy to see why: SaaS is cost-effective, easily scalable, and offers a collaborative environment to share data in a landscape where remote work has become common. Despite its wide adoption and importance, businesses have lagged in treating SaaS data with the same care they applied to on-prem data. That creates real risks.
In some cases, the oversight is caused by confusion. A recent survey revealed that 33% of IT leaders rely on their SaaS vendor partners to protect their SaaS resident data. Yet, that is not the explicit responsibility of those providers. This gulf in understanding creates undue risk.
With the shared responsibility model becoming the accepted distribution of responsibility, it is crucial that business leaders understand that SaaS applications are not liable for data loss, corruption, or unauthorized access—only for the availability and security of the platform.
At Own, we want to raise awareness of data loss and corruption and sharing resources to mitigate the impact. That’s why we created our latest guide, “3 Ways Data Is Lost—And How to Anticipate and Mitigate Its Impact.”
We’ve outlined the broad strokes below. Check out the link above for an in-depth analysis and best practices for protecting your data.
How Is Data Lost?
Own internal data tells a powerful story. Since 2021, nearly 14% of Own customers have used the Restore function—a tool that restores corrupted or lost data for the full organization or individual objects—on a monthly basis. Given this regularity, preparing for the inevitable and developing a proactive plan can make the difference between a significant business disruption and just another day on the job.
The most common scenarios where we observe data loss are:
User error
We’re all human; we make mistakes. User error and accidental deletion are common, even inevitable, outcomes of people interacting with large data sets. By recent counts, user error accounts for as much as 24% of all data loss.
Migrations
Digital transformation keeps businesses on the cutting edge and innovating at the pace of culture. However, migrating to new platforms creates opportunities for data loss. Whether it’s hardware or software failures or incompatible data formats, the complex process of moving data between solutions is a source of loss that can be difficult to recover from.
Cyber attacks
Cyber attackers follow the data. Today, much of it is in the cloud. According to Crowdstrike, cloud attacks have increased dramatically last year by 110%. Cyber attacks on SaaS platforms can be particularly pernicious given their inherently collaborative design, multitude of integrations, and the attacker’s ability to spread the threat quickly throughout the environment.
The Impacts of Data Loss
Data loss is bad for business. It disrupts operations, interrupts continuity for your customers, frustrates staff, damages reputations, and can even result in regulatory fines and legal penalties. It’s a bad look for individual organizations and has a ripple effect that moves throughout industries.
“Collectively, errors in this area reduce trust in organizations and in technology generally,” says Eoghan Casey, Own’s Vice President of Cybersecurity Strategy and Product Development. “People feel less inclined to use it, and that carries a bigger business impact that extends to the vast world of technology and its use, effectively creating risk for the company and the industry at large.”
Creating an ecosystem where data is protected and well utilized is our shared responsibility. Find out how you can do your part by learning about data loss and best practices to prevent it, mitigate any impacts, and ensure business continuity.
To learn more, download our guide, “3 Ways Data Is Lost—And How to Anticipate and Mitigate Its Impact”.
