Data loss is a critical issue for many companies, enterprises and individual users. As many companies deal with sensitive company data and confidential client or customer information, data must be protected at all costs. Photos and video files may be irreplaceable. If contracts and other legal documents are lost, it can be a time-consuming and costly process to redo them. Many people and companies rely on software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to secure their data and keep it safe. But is it possible for data loss to occur?
SaaS use in companies and organizations
Can data loss occur in SaaS? The short answer is yes. But before we look at the various reasons that data loss occur, let’s look at the stats of companies that use SaaS. A recent survey by Aberdeen interviewed 123 companies to determine how each uses the public cloud as part of their IT infrastructure.
As you can see in the graph above, SaaS was by far the most common with 80% of all companies interviewed stating that they use SaaS of some type in their organization.
Most software vendors now provide SaaS versions of their apps. Google Apps and SalesForce are a couple of the most popular while there are SaaS apps for many services such as CRM, database management, email, ecommerce and much more. The chart below shows the percentage of companies that use specific types of SaaS applications.
Data loss in SaaS
So now that we have shown how prevalent SaaS application use is among companies, let’s get back to data loss. During the survey, Aberdeen asked the companies how many had experienced data loss and what types of data loss occurred. The chart below shows that 68% of all companies reported no data loss but that 32% reported various types of data loss.
The vast majority of data loss is human error as 47% reported end-user deletion while 17% were due to employee mistakes. Hackers that breached security and deleted data accounted for 13%, while 10% ended their SaaS and lost data as a result. Malicious deletion, such as by disgruntled or recently-fired employees, made up 7% and application errors also made up 7%.
Dropbox is one of the most popular SaaS services that is used mainly for storage and file-sharing. But there is a known bug in Dropbox that can actually cause data loss. While rare, this could be a devastating blow to companies that deal with sensitive and confidential data in the cloud. Other cases show that Google Drive has also experienced multiple issues with data loss through their SaaS app.
SaaS data loss solution
There is actually a simple solution to prevent data loss when using SaaS applications- don’t put all your eggs in one basket! Replicate all your data between SaaS services using cloudHQ, the leading cloud data replication and backup service. This way, if one service is down (i.e., Google Drive is unavailable) you can switch to another cloud service and continue working or accessing your data. Also, if a file in one service is accidentally or maliciously deleted and the previous versions or trash is recycled through one service, it can be easily restored using the other service. Or as they say: “when it comes to important data, two is one and one is none.”
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