Combined with COVID-19, c-level executives see the need to back up their SaaS data.
I had the opportunity to speak with Shyam Oza, Director of Product Management at Kaseya about their Spanning backing product suite in light of Salesforce no longer offering data recovery service as of July 31, 2020, since they were not able to deliver the level of service their clients desired and deserved. Salesforce is recommending that customers use their partners to provide backup and recovery.
Ten years ago when people started using the cloud and SaaS, few people understood the need to back up their data. Users saw five-nine availability and stability and ease of use. However, they failed to understand the shared responsibility model of SaaS where the provider is responsible for the system, while the user is responsible for their data and the access thereof. Few to no users thought about the threats to their Salesforce data.
Salesforce customers tend to be more mature and SaaS savvy and were aware that Salesforce offered backup. However, for clients that had to use Salesforce backup, they quickly learned that they did not know what’s been updated or deleted and if you ask Salesforce to rollback to a specific date, you’re going to lose a lot of good data as well. Also, if you do not have a dedicated Salesforce developer, there’s a significant learning curve to understanding how to backup CSV files and reload them. The same is true for Office 365 and G Suite.
Once COVID-19 hit, things got busy for Spanning. When Salesforce announced they were no longer providing data recovery, c-level executives wanted to ensure their data was being backed up in all of their SaaS. Spanning has booked more demos in the last month than they did in the previous six months.
Governance, compliance, data availability, and data recovery are important for every industry and particularly for financial services and healthcare. Companies want to know how data is stored, if it’s SOC 2 compliant, if it enables GDPR deletion requests, to adhere to new global presence policies.
Spanning has a formal process to protect data that is audited and certified every year as their CISO monitors processes for releases and code changes. Spanning relies on Oauth 2.0 and does not store credentials. Data is stored in S3 and is accessible via the app token supported by bringing your own key.
Shyam noted that Salesforce is now used for far more than just CRM. For example, drug development firms are using Salesforce to manage their clinical trials by tracking all of the participants in a drug study on the platform.
Plug and play customization options on the platform are enabling many more use cases. However, few people understand the consequences these customizations have with intricate dependencies. Once you build an app and it becomes business-critical, making changes becomes more challenging. As such, enterprises need to ensure the data is backed up and can be restored in just a few clicks.
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