SUMMARY
Gartner has predicted SaaS market to become the largest market segment, growing at 18% rate in 2021
Businesses depend on data to stay on top and in turn on future-proof IT solutions to keep that data available and ready for action
More advanced SaaS models will also be able to deliver built-in protection against cyber-attacks
The pandemic has hugely impacted our lives, with several business sectors barely surviving to stay afloat. The rate of cloud adoption in India, and globally, has grown significantly this year, as many companies that were not in the cloud already, were compelled to migrate to it by enforced remote work.
In fact, the new world order has seen Software as a Service (SaaS) gaining prominence like never before. With limited budgets and accelerated digital growth, SaaS has become the ultimate choice for enterprise IT investments – whether big or small.
To this end, Gartner has predicted SaaS market to become the largest market segment, growing at 18% rate in 2021 alone. The overall demand in subscription-based software, coupled with legislation and compliance requirements, and the need to protect business data are the key factors creating a groundswell of demand for simple SaaS (or SaaS-based) solutions. A Bain & Co. report suggests that the Indian SaaS market will grow around 50% annually to over $20 Bn in 2022.
The SaaS Surge
Businesses depend on data to stay on top and in turn on future-proof IT solutions to keep that data available and ready for action. Every minute. Every day. Every time. The conversations have rapidly shifted from deciding whether businesses should put workloads in the cloud to which workloads they should move to the cloud first. With the adoption of cloud, there comes the adoption of newer economic models that IT organisations may not historically be used to of. Often, one of the ways to look at this is through an OPEX, rather than a CAPEX model.
While moving to cloud has become relatively earlier, one thing enterprises must keep in mind is that data stored in the cloud is still a business responsibility, not cloud service providers’. But with holistic data management solutions at hand, it is possible to seamlessly transition to cloud storage while managing, monitoring and securing it with a data protection service at the same time.
Managing Data Risk
We hear it and live it every day: in the digital world, the only constant is change. New customer needs, changing market conditions and emerging revenue opportunities can turn today’s winners into tomorrow’s ‘where are they now?’
There’s a brutal irony at the core of every digital business – the transformed infrastructure that helps an organisation to scale up, pivot and innovate at lightning speed can also make it equally vulnerable to data threats and breaches. If not treated with caution, multi-cloud and hybrid environments can be costly and challenging to work with, making it difficult to move, manage and protect your data.
It’s hard to put data to work for customers and innovation when it’s scattered across silos, clouds, and on-premises storage, all managed with different backup and recovery products. In this way, one would never know what potential riches might be hidden from view.
The Way Forward
While SaaS models are faster and smarter today at affordable prices, they are still vulnerable to data leaks or cybersecurity attacks that can affect the users as well the organization. That is why SaaS Data protection becomes very crucial. SaaS platforms must follow data compliances and privacy guidelines set by regulatory bodies. Data encryption and securing backup of user data must be the top priority of SaaS companies to thwart the hackers from data breaches.
Businesses should be looking for cost-effective and enterprise-grade protection, without complexity. The best solutions on the market will provide SaaS data protection that is capable of reducing costs, decreasing overheads and eliminating headaches.
With this, companies can save precious budget finances on things like network, hardware and infrastructure expenses. Furthermore, they will benefit from fully-hosted data protection, meaning they will never face installation, configuration or large upfront capital investments again.
More advanced SaaS models will also be able to deliver built-in protection against cyber-attacks through air-gapped and immutable copies of data, together with hardened security controls that prevent unauthorised access to backup data. Given the continued threat of ransomware, which has only increased this year, watertight protection such as this is invaluable right now for companies across all sectors.
