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  • Data Protection for SaaS

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    Christophe Bertrand

    Research Objectives

    Organizations are increasingly reliant on SaaS for many of their mission-critical applications and workflows. This means that a significant amount of business-critical data associated with these applications is now also cloud-resident. As a result, it is more important than ever that this data is available or at least recoverable. However, there is (still) a problematic misunderstanding about the responsibility for protecting SaaS data. While maintaining application uptime is the responsibility of individual SaaS providers, the onus for the availability and protection of data typically falls on IT organizations. This data protection gap exposes organizations to potential data loss, compliance and governance violations, and general operational risks.

    In order to gain further insight into these trends, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 398 IT professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) personally familiar with and/or responsible for SaaS data protection technology decisions, specifically around those data protection and production technologies that may leverage cloud services as part of the solution.

    This study sought to answer the following questions:

    • What steps, if any, do organizations take to protect the data associated with the SaaS applications they currently use?
    • Have organizations experienced any data losses or corruption with any of the SaaS applications they use over the past 12 months?
    • What are the most common causes of data loss or corruption for SaaS-based applications?
    • What benefits have organization realized as the result of using a solution to protect SaaS application solutions?
    • What are the biggest challenges organizations have experienced with the data protection solution(s) they use for SaaS applications?
    • What are the most important characteristics or considerations of a data protection solution, whether third-party or internally developed, for SaaS applications?
    • How do organizations characterize the mission criticality of the major SaaS applications they currently use?
    • What are the recovery time objectives (i.e., downtime tolerance) for the SaaS applications and workloads organizations protect today?
    • What are the recovery point objectives (i.e., transaction or data loss tolerance) for the SaaS applications and workloads organizations protect today?
    • Over the next 12-24 months, what level of IT priority do organizations expect to give to protecting SaaS applications, customizations, and associated data?
    • How do organizations typically fund the data protection solutions used to protect their SaaS-based applications?

    Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.

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  • Why I Joined Enterprise Strategy Group

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    Jon Brown

    I’m honored to be a part of the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) as lead analyst for observability, IT operations, and sustainability in IT. Previously, I was publisher and VP of market insights for infrastructure at ESG’s parent organization, TechTarget. In that role, I worked with hundreds of IT vendors’ leadership teams helping them leverage original market insights to improve their go-to-market results. Throughout that time, one consistent observation I had was that the content and insights that came from Enterprise Strategy Group were both more insightful and higher performing than content that came from other analyst groups– big ones you’ve heard of –because ESG always brought “the bigger truth” to light. And that truth was being illuminated by industry heavyweights– people like Jon Oltsik and Adam Demattia – who are amongst the smartest and most effective people I’ve ever worked with in their respective domains. 

    As a researcher and data nerd (and confirmed sapiosexual), I get excited by the quality and quantity of data  available to me to assist in providing you with market insights – especially around emerging trends and market changes. Imagine having real-time data on what 29 million IT buyers are researching right now and how exactly that is changing. Is that useful information for a marketer or product strategist? Imagine being able to combine that with deep topical research that is informed by surveys and end-user interviews. Couple that with a group of analysts who are all well regarded in their areas of expertise and you end up with nirvana – OK, not quite nirvana – but a really great situation, nonetheless.

    My goal is to be as useful as possible to Enterprise Strategy Group clients by providing them with the best insights, commentary, and content – as ESG has always done for its clients.

    Take a look at this video with myself and my esteemed colleague, Scott Sinclair, as we have a brief discussion about what brought me to the Enterprise Strategy Group and what I see as the major market dynamics that will impact observability in the near term. We also discuss how sustainability goals are changing infrastructure, operations, and software buyers both in what they buy and how they manage its usage and lifecycle. Suffice it to say that the combination of economic outlook, artificial intelligence, cloud-native development, and a mass realization that unmanaged cloud is expensive is going to make 2023 a year of great change. Let’s go!

  • Prioritizing Shift Left Security Solutions to Keep Up with Faster Release Cycles

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    Melinda Marks

    As organizations modernize their software development processes leveraging cloud services for faster, more efficient software application delivery, cybersecurity teams are investing in developer-focused security tools to keep up. ESG research shows organizations have experienced a range of security incidents, many caused by preventable coding mistakes. This puts pressure on security teams to incorporate security into development to fix coding issues before the applications are deployed and to enable efficient remediation to prevent security incidents.

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  • Addressing Cloud Infrastructure and Open Source Code for Cloud Application Security

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    Melinda Marks

    As organizations move to cloud-native application development to meet business demands with greater productivity and innovation, security teams need to adapt their application security strategies to support modern development processes. Developers’ increased usage of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) to provision their own cloud infrastructure and the availability of open source software (OSS) enable them to efficiently build, release, and update their software. Security teams need to ensure that they have the right security processes and controls in place to support these key components of cloud-native software and to effectively manage risk as development scales.

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  • Ransomware Data Recovery Needs Work

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    Christophe Bertrand

    Most organizations are not doing a very good job of protecting all their mission-critical data and applications. And, after suffering a ransomware attack, these victimized companies further report difficulties in recovering clean and recent data that might also have been compromised. Businesses have several options to protect their data and applications from attack but are slow in adopting perhaps the most viable and practical solution: air-gapped data protection infrastructure.

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  • Ransomware: The Gift That Keeps on Taking

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    Christophe Bertrand

    Ransomware attacks are frequent, disruptive, and costly, but paying a ransom to the perpetrators as a quick fix is a bad idea. Ransom payments usually don’t guarantee the return of all the stolen data or prevent further attacks. Even the data that’s returned may have been encrypted or compromised. That’s why ransomware attacks must be prevented before they happen. And if they do occur, a foolproof data backup and recovery process must be in place to avoid suffering the consequences of paying a ransom and rewarding bad behavior.

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  • State of the Ransomware Preparedness Market

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    Christophe Bertrand

    Findings from a TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group survey gauging the state of the ransomware preparedness market conclude that much work lies ahead for many organizations as they holistically address and resolve ransomware’s ongoing threat to disrupt IT and business operations. Though most organizations are at a relatively low level of ransomware preparedness maturity, a notable gap exists in attack prevention and data recovery between the companies most prepared and the industry average.

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  • The State of DataOps Implementations

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    Mike Leone

    The demand for rapid actionable analytical insights is forcing organizations to prioritize agility, transparency, and speed across their data ecosystems. These enterprises are investing in data-driven initiatives that maximize operational efficiency, improve collaboration, and accelerate time to value. They’re turning to DataOps.

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  • The Shift in DataOps Stakeholders

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    Mike Leone

    Gone are the days when the data engineer was the key persona driving DataOps. IT operations, line-of-business leaders, developers, and end-users can all claim roles in the direction of their company’s DataOps initiatives. While this cross-functional team approach to DataOps is viewed as a positive trend, the ongoing technical skills gap in key DataOps positions continues to plague most organizations, overburden stakeholders, and compromise the value of DataOps initiatives.

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  • The Value of DataOps Initiatives

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    Mike Leone

    Data quality issues, distributed data, tool proliferation, overburdened and underskilled teams, rising costs, and increased risk all contribute to the complexities of today’s data ecosystem that hinder the democratization of data and analytics. As a result, organizations are looking for ways to empower data teams to reliably deliver data and analytics to all consumers. DataOps processes liberate data silos and democratize workloads throughout the data lifecycle, yielding significant improvements in data quality, cross-functional collaboration, and analytics outcomes.

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  • What Ransomware Attackers Really Want

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    Christophe Bertrand

    Ransomware attackers disrupt business operations by targeting a variety of data sources and leveraging multiple types of infrastructure to get what they want: business’ money. But the most often targeted point of entry in successful ransomware attacks is not a bad link in an infected email. Rather, the most vulnerable points of attack lie in the software and misconfigurations. Therefore, organizations must plan for every contingency, look beyond safeguarding the obvious vulnerabilities, and protect all components of their IT environment.

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  • IT and Business Priorities Supported with Hosted Desktops

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    Mark Bowker

    VDI and DaaS are primed to displace traditional desktops, as the benefits of hosted desktops for both IT and the business come into focus. Over the next 12 to 24 months, organizations plan to decrease their use of traditional desktops, while use of VDI and DaaS, by contrast, shows no signs of decreasing, suggesting that hosted desktops are becoming the approach of choice for IT decision makers.

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