The multi-cloud world is the new reality. Today, several enterprise applications are “cloud-first” or born in the cloud, while others have migrated from on-premises to multi-cloud environments. At the core of the complex and challenging cloud journey is the fundamental need for application and data protection.
The ability to protect and recover business-critical applications like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, as well as virtual servers and databases across multi-cloud environments is the key to improved business resilience and a successful cloud transformation. In addition, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have their own set of challenges — protecting data is the responsibility of the data owners and not the cloud platform vendors.
Organizations need a single cloud-native platform to help them scale and overcome the fundamental challenges of their multi-cloud journey. That’s exactly why Collaborative Solutions chose to extend its implementation of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud for 1,200 endpoints to include SaaS applications Microsoft 365 and Salesforce.
Druva delivers a single pane of glass for multi-cloud backup across endpoints, Microsoft 365, and Salesforce
“I had non-negotiables, and one of those was multi-cloud backup management from a single console,” said Tiffany Tucker, VP of security and technical services at Collaborative Solutions. “Druva was one of the few vendors that could protect both cloud and endpoints with that single pane of glass view. Plus, Druva already had established relationships with all our SaaS vendors, so we knew it would integrate seamlessly.”
“We had a great experience with our endpoint backup, so extending our Druva partnership to include Microsoft 365 and Salesforce data was the natural next step,” Tucker said.
Druva is delivered as-a-service and backs up data center, cloud, edge workloads, and SaaS applications, improving business resilience and accelerating the time-to-value of cloud projects.
With Druva, organizations can safeguard and centrally manage data across multi-cloud environments with secure, scalable, cloud-native backup, and cloud disaster recovery.
Why back up SaaS applications with a third-party data resilience solution?
“People don’t realize a company like Microsoft is responsible for maintaining platform uptime while you are responsible for the protection and long-term retention of your Microsoft 365 data,” Tucker said. “So if you rely on its built-in capability, you have inconsistency across platforms.”
Not only does that affect visibility, but it can also affect compliance with data security principles like the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) Triad, and regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “One of the key parts of data security is data access, so we need to be sure we can protect our data from ransomware or accidental deletion,” Tucker said.
The backup and restore functionalities for Microsoft 365 applications such as Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, are often a misunderstood aspect of Microsoft 365. Microsoft itself says it best in their service agreement: “We recommend that you regularly back up your content and data that you store on the services or store using third-party apps and services.”
Druva provides a 100% SaaS solution to achieve complete protection for your critical Salesforce data, too. It provides reliable, automated daily backups of data and metadata, combined with fast, easy recovery from secure air-gapped storage to prevent any data loss incidents.
Multi-layered cyber resilience with a SaaS-based data resilience solution
Druva gave Tucker’s team the confidence that “If anything were to happen and we needed to restore data for our cloud resources, we could,” she said. “We know ransomware attacks aren’t going anywhere, and we need to make sure if we are affected by ransomware, we can recover our data.”
Tucker’s team now has a solution that will allow them to quickly identify unusual activity and prevent contamination spread of ransomware within minutes of detection. They will be able to scan snapshots before recovery to eliminate reinfection as well.
Going forward, the company will continue to expand its cloud usage. But Tucker has a firm policy in place for evaluating potential SaaS vendors — starting with a full risk assessment. “We analyze every vendor to understand what data protection gaps we need to fill,” Tucker explained. “We work off the assumption we will be hit with ransomware, and understand what our responsibility is versus the vendor. Having Druva as a foundation makes that crisis planning so much easier.”
What’s next?
Read the Collaborative Solutions case study to learn how, with Druva, the team achieved complete backup visibility across its 1,200 endpoints and all Salesforce and Microsoft 365 data.