Jason Buffington .com

video transcript

Don’t confuse SaaS durability with the need to protect its data. Since the beginning of data centers, there were two reasons why IT professionals do backups and data protection.

1. When a server breaks, you had to get it running again – via restore or failover
2. You need previous versions, because sometimes data goes bad or gets overwritten

For IT professionals that grew up in data centers, even as the platforms evolved, we always knew you still had to do foundational management activities like backups. The challenge is that a significant portion of SaaS administrators did not grow up in the data center and so some of them significantly underestimate the importance of still doing backups today.

Many SaaS platforms are natively durable – they have native replication, so your email, files, or contacts might be coming from Redmond Washington or Dublin Ireland. You can’t tell and you don’t care because the platform may be natively durable.

Moreover, unlike when a server dies in the datacenter and you fail it over, you will not be ‘failing over’ Microsoft 365 or Salesforce outside of its platform.  That said:

• If a platform is down, you better have a way to still get to time sensitive data
• If data is overwritten, its durability won’t help you … you still need previous versions

If your corporate data has a 5-, 10-, or 20-year retention requirement, your choice to use a service instead of server does not relieve you of those retention requirements.

SO … you still have to back up your SaaS data.

Frankly, not all SaaS platforms are easily back-up-able. Arguably, there’s the top ten enterprise SaaS platforms that do have back up options (ps, the backup utility of the application rarely counts) – and then there are the hundreds of SaaS apps that only a few backup solutions have any answer for, and the rest just need a routine export.

If you cannot find a way to protect the data in a SaaS platform that your business wants to rely on, then either:

• Look for a supplemental backup solution that does cover that SaaS workload
• Or look for an alternative SaaS solution that addresses the same business process. 

If your business relies on any IT platform, you have to be able to back it up; period.