Enterprises To Prioritise SaaS Application Backup Due To IT Outage Risk: Gartner

By 2028, 75% of enterprises will prioritise backup of software-as-a-service applications as a critical requirement, compared to 15% in 2024, according to research and consulting firm Gartner Inc.

SaaS-based applications have become a preferred choice for new and modernised deployments, with the data these applications generate expected to be among the fastest growing sets of enterprise data over the next five years. According to Gartner's forecast, worldwide end-user SaaS spending is projected to grow 20% to total $247.2 billion in 2024 and is forecasted to reach nearly $300 billion in 2025.

"The risk of IT outages underscores the urgent need for regular backup and recovery of critical enterprise data," said Michael Hoeck, senior director analyst at Gartner. "As businesses are more dependent on SaaS technologies, it becomes crucial to ensure that SaaS data is both protected and recoverable. Given the vulnerability of SaaS data to errors, cyberattacks and vendor mishaps, robust backup solutions are indispensable."

Integrating backup-as-a-service is important for safeguarding cloud workloads and maintaining operational continuity for enterprises. Businesses must also understand the shared data responsibility model of SaaS applications and evaluate their vendors' data-protection measures. If these measures are inadequate, third-party solutions should offer comprehensive data protection.

According to Gartner, protection and recovery of SaaS applications have been a lower priority for many enterprises. This is due to confusion over the native SaaS vendor's responsibility for data protection and the lack of industry-level standardisation. Limited API-based data access for protection and recovery from native SaaS vendors further complicates effective data protection, slowing support for third-party backup solutions.

However, the SaaS application backup market is growing, initially led by startups but now also including established enterprise backup and recovery software solutions companies. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 75% of large enterprises will adopt BaaS alongside on-premises tools to back up cloud and on-premises workloads.

To safeguard SaaS-based application data, organisations should focus on: governance assessment, which includes data protection and recovery capabilities in the governance assessment of SaaS applications; vendor capabilities, which includes verifying the SaaS vendor's ability to protect and recover data from different loss scenarios; and using third-party backup solutions to complement the native capabilities of SaaS vendors, which have the potential to improve administration, protect multiple SaaS applications, simplify processes, and offer improved recovery capabilities.