When my Microsoft Office applications are acting up, Google Docs is always there to save the day. Earlier today, I tried sorting files in my Google Docs and was quite surprised to see that I have actually stored several files that are non-native in this platform—literally becoming an extension of my hard drive rather than an avenue for collaboration. Imagine how terrified I was when it went suffered downtime and momentarily crashed last week, leaving me wishing for offline functionality.

This is a clear example of how one can be so dependent on cloud services, and it’s only expected to get worse.  A recent Gartner report Gmail alone represents half of the email cloud market.  That’s a huge bout of storage, with exponentially amassing data from its millions of customers.

“While cloud email is still in its infancy, at three to four per cent of the overall enterprise email market, we expect it to be a growth industry, reaching 20 per cent of the market by year-end 2016, and 55 per cent by year-end 2020,” said Matthew Cain, research VP at Gartner.

It’s a reminder of the importance of file backup, even for files kept in a service like Google Docs.  So along comes Spanning Backup for Google Apps v2.0, a business-class cloud-to-cloud back up by Spanning.

There’s a variety of functions that Google Apps offer, including a web-based calendar, spreadsheets, email, word processing, photo editing, presentations and much more.  And perhaps its finest feature (apart from being free) comes with the ability for users to share any work made real-time.  It’s a growing ecosystem Google’s building around its cloud-based services, and that’s generating opportunities for other startups as well.

Charlie Wood, Spanning Cloud Apps founder and CEO, explains how they got interested in the venture of backing up Google applications:

“Gmail backup has been, by far, the most requested capability from our existing customer base. After a successful private beta period, we’re excited to make it generally available and start helping businesses better protect their data. Data is the lifeblood of any business, and we’ve built Spanning Backup with a clear understanding of how important it is to protect our customer’s data.”

With over 40 million users worldwide, it is very interesting to know how many like myself exist across continents.  Spanning also revealed an infographic that show how we actually utilize Google Apps.  Remarkably, more than half (or 53.2%) of the content stored in Google Apps are non-Google files, leaving the function of the apps to become more of storage for PDF’s, PowerPoint and audio visual presentations.  The rest is shared by native Google docs, spreadsheets and presentations. The numbers are a manifestation that organizations are now turning to Google apps to keep business-critical data.

The analysis succeeding the infographic noted that: “Google Apps scales to meet the needs of normal people and ultra power users alike, all at the same low (or in some cases free) price point. However, the assumption that heavy usage is the norm has been debunked. The average user barely even scratches the surface of the storage capabilities available to them.”

Everything circles back to storage after all.  With the boom in social networking, people are also interested on how to ensure that when disaster strikes, their social media data would be saved.  It’s paved the way for companies like Spanning, and  just last week, Backupify received financial support to build clouds for social media marketers.  A day after, they got another $5 million, this time to engineer something dedicated for Google apps.