SaaS: Five Ways to Lose Your Data

While security is typically the biggest worry users have about using cloud services, a related worry is data loss.  In 2013, the Aberdeen Group reported that nearly a third of companies that have used SaaS services in the cloud have lost some of their data.  When selecting a cloud vendor, users are often primarily concerned with uptime SLAs and server performance, but they often overlook data backups when making a decision.

Data loss likely happens more frequently than you might imagine.  Dick Csaplar, director of Product Marketing at SDL, wrote that “once an individual data element in a SaaS application gets changed and the application closed, there is little to no ability to recall the old data.  If a particular data field is over-written by an end-user, co-user, or contributing application, the original data is either lost entirely or becomes difficult and expensive to recover. Some SaaS providers do offer services to recover over-written or deleted data, but those services can take several weeks before the data is produced and be very expensive.”

A report by the Aberdeen Group identified five ways that data is typically lost when using cloud services:

User Error.  This is the most frequent reason for data loss.  Users make mistakes.  Nearly two thirds of all data loss incidents are because of mistakes.

Closed Accounts.  When an employee leaves, if their cloud accounts are closed, access to the data they had created or received may also be deleted.  Ten percent of organizations say that they lose data in this way.

Hacker/Theft.  Ten percent of users reported that they lost data due to an outsider gaining access to their system and data.  Often it just takes a hacker getting access to a single user’s account in order to compromise your data.

Malicious Deletion.  Seven percent of organizations report problems where disgruntled employees have purposely deleted data

Third-party Software.  Seven percent of organizations also report that they’ve had problems losing data when third party software is used with their SaaS applications, for example, for syncing or importing data.

While it seems like problems like dealing with closed accounts and hackers may have a slightly higher probability of occurring in the cloud, none of these ways are really unique to SaaS cloud applications, they’re problems that business have had to deal with for some time in the on-premise world too.