The value of SaaS backup beyond recovery

With modern cloud backup technology and an increasing focus on backup for SaaS application data, the landscape for backup solutions is changing rapidly.

The primary purpose of any backup is to serve as your insurance policy for data loss. While that will always be true, we see exciting customer trends that suggest IT leaders find more ways to realize value from backups beyond just recovery.

Simple end-user portal for self-service recovery

IT professionals have essential work that is strategic to the business. Keeping users productive is part of the job, but if you can help users to help themselves, you can reduce help desk calls and focus on the more significant tasks.

When it comes to SaaS recovery scenarios, you will generally have requests to recover individual items or folders. Restore procedures like this can be time-consuming for IT professionals.

A trend we see more and more is the idea of enabling users to perform their own restores. This is one way you can realize more value by empowering users with a secure and easy-to-use portal that allows them to browse, search, and recover their data. With Veritas, authentication is unified with your organization’s Azure Active Directory (AD), and users have access to their data only through permissions synchronization with the source SaaS applications.

1.      Search capabilities in Veritas Alta SaaS Protection

Sophisticated data management for security and risk mitigation

Seeding backups from SaaS applications offer many opportunities to build context around the content. In other words, in addition to capturing files, folders, messages, and conversations, the SaaS backup process can catch a plethora of surrounding metadata such as data owner, permissions, activity, labels, tags, comments, versions, custom attributes, and more.

Cloud-based backup technologies can leverage additional computing power and services in the cloud to make use of metadata – and extract other metadata – to offer you a high-resolution understanding of your data.

The net result is that you can identify and isolate important datasets in your backup using sophisticated queries, provided your backup solution offers the user interface or APIs to achieve this. These queries may be for informational or telemetry purposes only. For example, a report provides a summary of what a person can access or track and report on data containing sensitive numerical patterns.

The queries can also drive targeted data management actions, either on a one-time or dynamic basis. For example, you can tag sensitive or problematic data to have unique, automatic treatment, for example, apply additional security, block user retrieval, make immutable, flag for review, and delete.

A single place to search

Discovery searches and holds have traditionally been associated with archiving. However, data privacy rules are a growing requirement that has us searching through more than just archives. And discovery for legal in the world of SaaS can mean a different search and hold procedure for each application.

A SaaS backup solution like Veritas Alta™ SaaS Protection can deliver value by giving you a single place to search, manage holds, and extract data.

2.      Performing an ad hoc search in Veritas Alta SaaS Protection

As we work with our customers, we see the value of central search realized naturally. Veritas Alta SaaS Protection’s discovery interface is suitable for power users, but it is simultaneously intuitive and straightforward for non-techie users to jump in without training. Central search becomes more and more of a value as you protect more data types on the platform.

If you’d like to learn more about how your organization can get the full value from your SaaS data, get more details on our SaaS backup solutions.