This year over 70% of enterprises are expected to run their business on SaaS applications. In fact, M365 is the most widely used cloud service by user count, and 1 in 5 corporate employees now use an M365 Cloud service. With the increasing adoption of SaaS, it’s important to not confuse availability with data recoverability. Cloud providers guarantee service availability, and sometimes data retention, but that does not replace the need to protect mission-critical data from user error, insider threats, vulnerabilities or anything that compromises your data. Whether on-premises or in the public cloud, it is your responsibility to protect your data. With adoption high, let’s take a look at the enterprise data risk, M365 considerations from the enterprise, and why protecting data from SaaS sources should be part of your strategy in this reality check.
Enterprise Data Risk
It can be expected that there will be new data risks that introduce vulnerability to enterprise data. Regardless of where your corporate data resides consider the following statistics around risk. According to Statista there were 409 reported national disasters in 2019. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that a new business will fall victim to ransomware every 11 seconds by 2021. These are just a couple of examples, but regardless of the form of the data disaster, the cost can add up to $5,600 per minute, according to Gartner.
M365 Reality Check from the Enterprise
So what happens in M365 when a C-level executive cannot find an email message in Outlook when M365 is the backend, and it is not recoverable? Most out-of-box options in M365 won’t allow you to recover data beyond 30 days if no other steps to retain the data have been implemented. The hard lesson learned is that it’s best to have a data protection solution in place to ensure recovery can occur no matter what.
It’s because of these types of situations I now have a checklist of questions to ask when deciding how to best protect M365 data.:
- Does the enterprise have a requirement for protecting on-premises and cloud data?
- Does the solution I am looking to use offer a single pane of glass for hybrid cloud management?
- What are the enterprise commitments to Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)?
- Are there any Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) the business will expect?
- Can my data protection solution offer ransomware protection?
- Is there a way to isolate M365 data for legal and compliance requirements?
- Should I need to move back to on-premises from the cloud, do I have easy access to my enterprise data for exit planning?
If any/all of these are important to you, then having a true data protection solution for M365 should be a priority.
How Cohesity Simplifies M365 Data Protection
With a solution such as Cohesity, we can protect all of your data regardless of location, and maintain minute-level RTOs. If you need any/all of these elements, Cohesity is designed for your cloud journey no matter where you are on it.
- It is cloud-native and globally efficient—natively designed for the simplicity of the cloud with class-leading space efficiency.
- It delivers one platform and universal protection—it unifies and protects data that’s scattered across clouds on a single data platform.
- It empowers you to manage less so you can innovate more—it simplifies and automates data management while unlocking data for innovation and insights.
- It protects your data against natural and manmade disasters; including ransomware attacks.
- It offers an all-inclusive subscription-based license that protects M365 data by capacity and not the number of users.
Plus, the Cohesity modern solution addresses all the key uses and lifecycle for data management—when you need to back up your data, recover it if a disaster occurs, or leverage it for innovation projects. Cohesity has you covered.
