UPDATED 12:49 EDT / JULY 27 2015

CLOUD

Cloud data protection: Don’t assume you’re covered

It’s not uncommon any longer to see a company’s entire IT portfolio comprised of cloud apps. But is enterprise data safe in the cloud? The answer is yes, but with qualifiers. Vendors invest major portions of their budgets in security, but backup and disaster recovery is the white elephant that few vendors want to discuss, due to the high cost involved. Many companies have preferred to live with risk rather than back up their data, but disasters and catastrophic employee errors do happen, so proactively assessing risk can help prevent incidents that can kill a business.

It’s not the vendor’s responsibility to protect you

The big SaaS players like Google, Amazon and Salesforce.com, Inc. have good security and some options for backup. Recovery isn’t a major priority for them, though, and it’s often an expensive add-on service that can take days or even weeks to finish. Despite this, countless businesses rely on these SaaS services to operate even without a data recovery or backup offering.

Disaster doesn’t always come from the situations for which we can plan, either. Most think of hacker or cyber criminal activity necessitating data protection and business continuity. On the contrary, a majority of data loss results from accidents. Deleting an entry or a document doesn’t come with an easy undo solution for most SaaS vendors, since they’re hard-wired to obey your commands. In some cases, they may not be able to recover lost data at all.

These problems are common and can cost businesses substantially if no backup option is in place. They’re even more pronounced for companies in regulated industries. For example, if agents store customer financials in QuickBooks or copy forms to Dropbox to make them accessible from the field, there may be no safety net for accidental deletion or corruption. That can have major penalty implications on top of the loss of business.

Identifying cloud risk factors

Backup is not a snapshot in time. As the cloud matures, new partnerships or integrations may create file corruption or bugs that render a critical document unreadable. With SaaS applications and other cloud solutions accessed by multiple employees every day, overwrites are also a possibility. The kinds of problems that persist for companies relying on the cloud are abundant even as the technologies mature and become more reliable. It’s not a matter of pointing out every flaw in cloud services as much as protecting data when some of these problems inevitably arise.

The responsibility for protecting information lies with customers themselves. Vendors are on the hook for data breaches and internal outages that cause problems. They’re not liable when a customer employee makes a mistake. Just the same, there isn’t always value in pinpointing who’s at fault. Customers and other end users aren’t interested in knowing why they can’t access information or get the answers or feedback they need. They just want things to work. By anticipating the various risks or unintentional data disasters, you can take the essential steps to assure customer and client satisfaction without leaving anything to chance.

Many of the cloud’s detractors point to a lack of control over data as their motivation. Proactive policies to restore data and a clear understanding of risk factors address these concerns and position businesses to promote uptime and continuity.

About the Author 

robert-gibbons-headshotRobert J. Gibbons Jr. is chief technical officer of Datto, Inc.. He manages the company’s development and infrastructure initiatives in support of its comprehensive data backup and protection platform. Prior to Datto, Gibbons spent 15 years as a software engineer and CTO leading teams of developers building high-uptime enterprise applications for Fortune 500 clients. 

 


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