SaaS Data Escrow
Many companies want to use innovative new offerings from cloud vendors, but have concerns about vendor viability, unplanned service outages, and potential data loss or corruption. They’re also keen to ensure that they’re complying with their own data governance standards and can guarantee the availability of data for regulatory or business purposes. Even when companies are convinced of the benefits of cloud computing, they need to address these concerns and protect business-critical data.
Like code escrow but for data
The thought of an application vendor going out of business or being acquired is unnerving. With traditional “on-premise” enterprise software, precautions are taken to include code escrow as part of the license agreement. There are no concerns about the data in these instances because it’s already stored on-premise where the application resides. SaaS data escrow allows companies to protect the data that resides within SaaS applications should a vendor experience problems or should there be an unexpected loss of service. Furthermore, data escrow protects against accidental or malicious data loss.
The optimal destination for escrow copies of SaaS data
RainStor has been designed to simply and cost-effectively retain data while protecting it from change. Furthermore, RainStor was designed to run on commodity hardware or the cloud, ensuring that it can be used to store and manage snapshots of SaaS data on-premise or with third-party cloud providers. RainStor can be used to ensure that a copy of a company’s SaaS data is always available through a neutral 3rd party.
In addition, Saas data escrow provides an opportunity to improve the performance and flexibility of business analytics. The reporting and analytical needs of many companies often exceed the capabilities of SaaS applications. RainStor can be used to provide an application-independent copy of SaaS data that can be accessed by using industry standard BI or reporting tools.
Data escrow is not the same as backup or replication
It’s worth highlighting that SaaS data escrow should not be confused with data replication or backup. Data replication is the process of synchronizing or sharing data between multiple storage devices to support high availability. Data backup refers to making regular copies of data so that it can be recovered to a particular point in time following severe data corruption or loss. SaaS vendors undoubtedly employ backup and replication procedures that allow them to recover customer data following a catastrophic event and ensure adequate application performance. However, they might be unable or unwilling to surgically restore data for a particular customer following a discrete incident. RainStor can be used to keep snapshots of your data for whatever purpose, whenever required.
Whatever the reasons for considering SaaS data escrow, it could be said that “companies should not go cloud without it”.
If you’re an ISV, SI, or MSP, learn more about the benefits of delivering SaaS data escrow solutions or services Powered By RainStor.