The Coronavirus pandemic and the downturn in economies and businesses following it didn’t slow down the pace of digital transformation. On the contrary, the need for working and executing tasks remotely has brought new attention to digital collaboration tools and revitalized both discussions about and the execution of digital transformation strategies in many organizations.

Remote work, automation of processes and digitalization of services were needed to stay in business as the pandemic hit the world. Businesses were forced by the pace and the degree of change occurring to swiftly deploy new technologies to cross the business chasm and recover the operations. Digital transformation projects were accelerated in some cases by years.

However, the abrupt shift and rapid deployment of cloud collaboration services can lead to oversights in security configurations and undermine a sound data protection and security strategy.

Data Protection and Backup

Many customers confuse availability SLAs from Microsoft and other vendors with backup strategies. Others do not see the need to think of backup at all for cloud workloads because it is a “different” technology.

Regardless of whether data is on-premises or in cloud infrastructure/SaaS, such as Microsoft 365, the ultimate responsibility of data protection lies with the customer or the data owner–you. Adopting Microsoft 365 or any SaaS solution without enterprise-grade backup is a risky strategy.

There are multiple ways organizations lose cloud data:

 Digital Trust with Your Clients

Organizations must realize that they need to take responsibility for data themselves to ensure data security, privacy and retention. This is also an essential part, if not the most essential part, of creating a digital trust for an organization. Data should always be at the center of any organization’s digital transformation.

It Is Not Complicated

The good news is that, thanks to digital cloud-based services, it is not complicated to get the process of cloud backup started in a matter of minutes without any CapEx requirements and by creating a foundation for the future of data management in the organization.

Services like ConnectWise Recover SaaS, formerly a Continuum solution, are available. It is an example of an as-a-service approach that delivers specific functionality that provides the protection customers need on one of the most valuable business assets.

Intro to ConnectWise Recover SaaS

ConnectWise Recover SaaS makes it easy for MSPs by automating SaaS backup to protect client data and provide quick data restoration when needed. ConnectWise Recover SaaS backs up the following SaaS systems: Microsoft 365, including SharePoint and Teams, Google Workspace (formerly known as Google G Suite), Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Summary and Checklist for Backup of SaaS

We provided a lot of information to consider when designing your backup plan for SaaS workloads. As an MSP, you must educate your clients on the importance of backing up SaaS solutions like Microsoft 365 so they don’t lose data in the cloud.

To help you and your clients with a backup plan, here’s a list of questions to ask when determining the backup of SaaS:

For more information, check out our additional resources: ConnectWise Recover SaaS Data Sheet and our whitepaper, SaaS Data Backup—Everything You Need to Know (and Do) About It.

This blog was written in cooperation with Niels van Ingen, CCO and VP Business Development at KeepIt, and Sagar Kamat, Product Manager, ConnectWise Recover SaaS.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.