Why MSPs Should Backup Customers’ SaaS Data

18 July 2022

6 min read

Anju George

Blog Articles

The SaaS (Software as a Service) market has been steadily growing in the last decade and the pandemic has further accelerated its growth as more businesses move to the cloud.

On average, a company uses 110 SaaS applications, and this number is likely going to double in the next 3 years.

Bettercloud SaaSops report, 2021

Because of the widespread use of SaaS applications by businesses, there is an increased risk of data loss for a variety of reasons. Most SaaS applications explicitly state that they are not responsible for backing up their customers' data and that customers should consider third-party vendors for backup. As a trusted advisor to its customers, MSPs must ensure that critical business SaaS applications are regularly backed up so that business data is always available.

This article answers three key questions:

Why do MSPs need SaaS backup?
What are the data protection challenges for SaaS applications?
How can MSPs turn data protection challenges into opportunities?

Why do MSPs need SaaS backup?

COVID-19 and the Work from Home (WFH) model have accelerated the shift to a cloud-first model for office productivity apps. The data stored on the cloud and SaaS applications are now more vulnerable than ever, and therefore, protecting mission-critical SaaS data is a top business priority for your customers.

We give you four compelling reasons why MSPs need a cloud backup solution for their customers.

Protect your customers from SaaS data loss

Even though SaaS applications are extremely secure, data loss due to human errors such as accidental or malicious deletions, overwrites, sync errors, as well as threats from ransomware and phishing attacks, is inevitable.

Nearly 80% of the companies surveyed had experienced at least one cloud data breach incident in the past 18 months, and nearly half (43%) reported 10 or more cloud data breaches.

According to IDC research

These incidents are hard to prevent, and without a cloud backup solution in place, it would be impossible to recover your customers’ valuable data. Native recovery methods are tedious and time-bound, so much so that most SaaS platforms themselves recommend using third-party cloud-backup solutions to back up your data.

Ensure regulatory compliance

Compliance with the state, federal, and international laws and industry-based regulations is essential to eliminating risks and protecting consumers. A cloud backup solution with compliance data insights can help fulfil legal and litigation requirements. Given the potential consequences of non-compliance such as fines, lawsuits, revenue losses, or losing hard-earned trust, meeting compliance is an organization's duty.

Compliance laws like GDPR, HIPAA, FINRA, CCPA, and SOX mandate that data protection is a shared responsibility and expect you to have "the ability to restore the availability and access to personal data in a timely manner in the event of a physical or technical incident."

Minimize your customers’ data loss costs

SaaS backup solutions for MSPs can help minimize the impact and cost of data breaches on their customers. Even the shortest of downtimes can severely impact your customers’ businesses. The longer it takes to recover from a data loss, the more it will cost you and your customers.

Having a proper cloud backup solution in place can minimize your customer’s Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), thus ensuring faster disaster recovery. An optimal RPO and RTO will mitigate the monetary impact and business downtime consequences of data loss, while facilitating business continuity.

Data breach costs rose from 3.86 million dollars to 4.24 million dollars in 2021. Critical server outages often cost businesses more than $5 million per hour.

Cost of a Data Breach 2022 Report, IBM

Data protection can be a differentiator for MSPs

While offering data protection capabilities along with other services is a clear revenue opportunity, it has also become one of the most important MSP differentiators, as clients tend to favor and migrate to MSPs offering them complete data protection. Offering a cloud backup solution that provides automated backup, ransomware, phishing, and compliance gap insights, and point-in-time restore completes your MSP suite and differentiates you from the rest of the market. Providing a data protection safety net for your customers’ SaaS data can be one of your Unique Selling Propositions (USP).

SaaS backup challenges for MSPs

Limited SaaS backup coverage

Most of the SaaS backup vendors back up a limited number of SaaS applications. There is no unified solution to manage backup for diverse SaaS applications, making SaaS backup complex and expensive. Having a single pane of glass to manage all SaaS applications will save a lot of time and effort.

Cybersecurity threats

Ransomware and phishing attacks targeting SMBs and enterprises are on the rise. Third-party backup applications that offer out-of-the-box ransomware and phishing threat detections will provide administrators and MSPs to quickly recover from security threats and malicious attacks. Learn more about SysCloud’s backup data insights feature.

Expensive

Very few vendors have the capability to back up multiple SaaS applications from a single platform, but their services are restricted to enterprise customers and are not available for small-to-medium-businesses (SMBs). Even if they are open to non-enterprise customers, their service costs are too high for SMBs. Thus, small and mid-sized companies have limited options when it comes to unified SaaS backup on the cloud.

Turning data protection challenge into an opportunity

Partner with SysCloud backup to secure your customers’ SaaS data while increasing revenue.

Assume an MSP implements the SysCloud Microsoft 365 backup for 500 users. This translates into a yearly billable amount of $19,000 per the list price. If the MSP also backs up Salesforce, HubSpot, Quickbooks Online, and Slack, the topline increases by 230%. Managing backup for all critical clouds using a single pane of glass removes complexity and offers MSPs a faster path to ramping up revenues.