As I mentioned in my Data Protection Predictions for 2015 video, SaaS backup should be on the top of anyone’s mind who is running for the clouds: namely Office 365, SalesForce, or GoogleApps. According to ESG’s 2015 IT Spending Intentions Survey‘s five-year outlook for SaaS, over half of IT organizations will move from on-premises Exchange servers and File/Collab platforms to cloud-based SaaS services, with many already on their way:
Unfortunately, what most folks do not realize is that those SaaS platforms are still too new to have every core-IT feature that one might assume. One that is sorely missing is the easy API ability to be backed up. SaaS platforms are focused on availability and usage scenarios, period. Any backups that they do are strictly for their own SLA purposes, NOT your data retention or roll-back requirements. If one of your users enter bad data into a SalesForce record, delete the wrong e-mails, or overwrite some shared files, your SaaS vendor won’t help you.
More bad news: Most traditional backup solutions do not back up SaaS. So, when you move from those well‑protected Exchange and File/Collab platforms to the cloud, your traditional software probably can’t follow you … just like 10 years ago, your legacy solution couldn’t back up VMs when you went from physical servers to early VMware. For the early innovators in VM backups, Veeam continues to dominate mindshare as the VM-protection solution to beat, whilevRanger and PHD-Virtual were both acquired for their technology by larger organizations (Dell and Unitrends) that want to deliver a comprehensive data protection portfolio. Check out my previous Blog Post on SaaS Backup – Hunger Games Style.
In order to help understand the new category of SaaS Backup solutions, ESG Lab recently started doing ESG Lab Test Drives to test the these SaaS backup offerings against a Google Apps or Office365 data farm. Check out the first one:
ESG Lab Test Drive: Spanning’s (now part of EMC) solution for GoogleApps
By applying a standard set of hands-on tests to our own SaaS implementation, ESG hopes to help you see SaaS backup solutions the way that we do. Stay tuned as more SaaS Backup Test Drives are published.
[Originally blogged via ESG’s Technical Optimist.com]