EMC's Spanning Survey: User Error Leading Cause of Data Loss From SaaS Apps

Accidental deletion of information is the leading cause of data loss from SaaS applications in the United States and United Kingdom, ahead of malicious insiders and hackers.

That’s according to the results of a survey by Spanning, an EMC company, comparing the two regions in terms of SaaS adoption, data protection and compliance. The survey is based on responses from 1,037 IT professionals in the United States and United Kingdom.

Jeff Erramouspe, Spanning’s vice president and general manager, tells Channel Partners that SaaS adoption is on the rise and the channel is going to be a “key enabler for organizations who wish to move their core applications to SaaS models.”

“Unfortunately, many organizations are still under the false impression that their business-critical data is safe from loss when they move to SaaS applications,” he said. “As a trusted advisor to your customers, you can share with them that data loss is still a possibility due to user error, accidental deletions, hackers and application sync errors that the SaaS providers simply cannot prevent or recover from. Adding a third-party backup and recovery solution to the SaaS applications you represent will give your customers the confidence to move to the cloud and will make you their hero — not if data loss occurs, but when it does.”{ad}

More than half of IT pros in both regions said e-mail/messaging is deployed or will be deployed via SaaS in the next 12 months. Financial, human resources and customer-relationship management applications followed closely behind.

Organizations mostly rely on their SaaS vendors for backup and recovery of SaaS applications (49 percent in the U.S., 42 percent in the U.K.), despite the prominence of data loss due to user error (70 percent in the U.S., 66 percent in the U.K.), for which SaaS providers are not typically responsible, according to the survey. Roughly one-third of organizations in both regions are either using today or plan to use a cloud-to-cloud backup provider for backup and recovery of their SaaS applications within the next 12 months.

“From the United States to the United Kingdom, this is an opportunity for the channel to provide solutions that deliver not only a solution that helps to protect SaaS data from loss, but also a way to maintain both compliance and business continuity,” Erramouspe said.

By adding backup and recovery to their portfolio, partners give their customers “peace of mind, but also boost their revenues with higher average price per user on those applications and deliver solutions that have …

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… recurring revenue models with technology that is sticky,” he said.

Some 80 percent of U.S. IT pros are confident in their organization’s ability to secure SaaS application data, compared to 45 percent in the U.K. Also, while organizations in both regions have experienced data loss due to accidental deletions (43 percent in the U.S., 41 percent in the U.K.), migration errors (33 percent in the U.S., 31 percent in the U.K.), and accidental overwrites (27 percent in the U.S., 26 percent in the U.K.), they still are most concerned about external attacks (44 percent in both regions), according to the survey.

“SaaS backup and recovery is still in the early adoption stage with only 37 percent of U.S. and 31 percent of U.K. respondents using a third-party cloud backup solution,” Erramouspe said.

The survey found that half of U.S. and two in five U.K. IT pros agree that the rapidly changing European Union data-privacy regulations are creating a costly compliance burden. The survey also showed opposing views of the new rules among IT pros on both sides of the Atlantic, with those in the U.K. taking a more cautious approach to data sovereignty.

Despite the caution, the survey also indicated that a vast majority of IT pros agree (66 percent in the U.K., 72 percent in the U.S.) that storing data in a primary cloud provider’s E.U. data center will ensure 100 percent compliance with data and privacy regulations.