SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace offer flexibility, scalability, and collaboration. But while they themselves are very secure solutions, your data isn’t protected in the same way their infrastructure is. As both of them will tell you if asked, all of their customers should invest in third-party backup.
Your critical data is more vulnerable to data loss than commonly advertised. Human error, malicious intent, hackers, malware, sync errors, and natural disasters collectively add up.
- Human Error: If an account is mistakenly deleted, a critical email is erased, or an org-wide shared document is overwritten, it often can’t be fixed without a backup and recovery solution.
- Malicious Intent: Your SaaS data is also prone to intentional overwrites and deletion by bad actors, disgruntled contractors, or malicious employees.
- Synchronization Errors: Syncing or updating multiple SaaS applications—a common scenario in most organizations—is prone to errors and can cause loss of SaaS data.
- Hackers, Malware, Ransomware, Cryptomining, Phishing: There is an ever-growing list of malware methods and actors. The damages due to such data breaches are devastating, not only in terms of financial loss, but also reputational damage and a loss of customers.
- Outages: Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have high availability, but downtimes and outages are a reality. To prevent work from stopping every time services go down, real-time backup is the only answer.
Bottom Line: All the top IT analysts strongly advise backups for cloud data.
Top analysts like Gartner advise using backup. “Organizations that assume SaaS applications don’t require backup, or that the SaaS vendor’s data protection is good enough, may place critical data at risk,” says the analyst agency, adding, “Organizations cannot assume that SaaS providers will offer backup as part of the service or provide interfaces that backup vendors can use to access data.”
Need help to start proactively protecting your school’s Google Workspace and Office 365 data before it’s too late? Give us a call for more information and to receive your free Cloud Readiness Assessment.