January 31, 2025

The secret to
SaaS data
protection

In our last blog post, we talked about the reasons small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) depend on SaaS solutions for key business functions, and how vital business data can get locked up inside siloed SaaS apps. That’s a liability, and not just from a business strategy point of view. It can also bring some very real risks you should be aware of — which you can mitigate by centralizing your SaaS data.

Poor SaaS data protection can cost your business a lot

Last fall, BusinessWire reported on a survey that found many companies had only moderate confidence in SaaS data protection, with about a third (31%) of respondents saying they’d experienced moderate to severe lapses in data protection.

That should give anyone pause. 

A breach or loss caused by insufficiently protected SaaS data can damage your reputation and erode customer trust. It can also disrupt operations and cost you financially, both in revenue losses and also expenses related to data recovery. 

If your industry is subject to more stringent data privacy and security regulations — say, healthcare or finance, for example — the penalties can be even steeper.

Most SaaS providers offer some protection against data loss and theft. But it’s not always as comprehensive as you might think, and in the ‘shared responsibility’ model now well-established for cloud services, there may actually be protections you’re expected to provide yourself. That can be hard to do with no direct control over how your data is handled or stored — which is the case with most SaaS apps.

Compliance is another concern. Many SMBs need to document and track data custody or provenance and meet requirements for data sovereignty (storage in a particular jurisdiction), none of which is necessarily possible with SaaS applications.

What could possibly go wrong?

It’s one thing to appreciate the consequences of SaaS data loss, but it’s also important to understand how it can happen.

SaaS data can be vulnerable to natural disasters — fires, floods, hurricanes and the like — that damage infrastructure and cause data loss on the SaaS provider’s end. When that occurs, your data may not be recoverable as quickly as you need (if it’s recoverable at all). According to HYCU’s The State of SaaS Data Resilience in 2024 report, “90% of businesses cannot recover encrypted SaaS data within an hour, leading to costly downtime.”

In the event of a breach or cybercrime, data can be stolen (‘exfiltrated’) and used to commit theft, extortion and further breaches — not just against your business but also against your customers. If this sounds like a remote possibility, or if you think your company is too small to be a target, think again. SMBs are every bit as vulnerable to hacks and cyberattacks as big enterprises. 

Centralize for stronger SaaS data protection

The solution to these issues is to bring your SaaS data back under your own control, closing the data protection gaps that exist with conventional shared responsibility models. A secure, cloud-based software platform can make this relatively easy and seamless, ensuring data privacy and regulatory adherence, especially for SMBs in industries with stringent data requirements.

The other benefit of centralization is that you can bring together SaaS data with your other local corporate data. That puts everything in one place, with backup and recovery measures to ensure that all your data is equivalently recoverable in the event of a disaster or a breach.

If you’ve got data privacy, security or compliance concerns and want to learn more about centralizing for better SaaS data protection, I’d be happy to meet and talk through your needs. Book an appointment with me here to get the conversation started.

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