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SaaS and the criticality of data: Two mega-trends that will shape enterprise IT in 2023

By Dave Horton, VP of Solutions Engineering for Odaseva

Two mega-trends have utterly transformed enterprise IT over the past few years: the rapidly growing importance of data to enterprise competitiveness into day-to-day operations and the steady migration from on-premises software to software-as-a-service (SaaS). They will continue to do so in 2023. Here, we'll look at four areas within these two trends and how they will develop over the coming year.

Backup and Restore

It's now fairly well accepted (though not as well accepted as it should be) that data in SaaS applications needs to be backed up so it can be restored in case of accidental or malicious deletion, corruption and even ransomware attacks. In fact, a recent global survey of enterprise data decision makers released by Odaseva found that 51% of respondents had experienced a ransomware attack that targeted their SaaS data, and 52% of these attacks were successful. Moreover, cybercriminals had more success encrypting SaaS data than they did  endpoint, cloud and on-premises data. 

Security teams are well aware of the threat, and, as a result, they will be the primary driver for adopting backup solutions for critical SaaS applications. They'll need this capability to  restore SaaS as part of an annual business Continuity Plan. Additionally, security teams know that by following ISO framework standards, they will get more favorable discounts for cyber insurance.

In a related trend, enterprise IT budgets will grow to accommodate the costs associated with regular testing of the backup medium, ensuring that restores can be used for emergency use if required.

Archiving

Salesforce is one of the oldest and most common SaaS platforms, and many large enterprises depend on it for critical, day-to-day business operations. Adoption of the Salesforce Service Cloud and specifically Email to Case is growing fast, but deploying these solutions will require an archiving solution by default. The intake rate will cause performance and usability issues for a fair number of companies, which will drive the adoption of archiving solutions to remove unwanted information from Salesforce even if it is required to be held longer term to meet regulatory compliance.

Data lifecycle policies and a map of how long data should be kept long term will become a standard tool for the most mature data custodians. When it comes to archiving, organizations will need a process that will keep information for only as long as is strictly necessary to ensure privacy by design, but also compliance with GDPR and CPRA standards. 

Data Compliance

The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) comes into force in 2023, and it gives consumers rights that take effect retroactively. Specifically, a consumer can request information on them from companies that was collected on them as far back as January 1, 2022. CPRA will add further urgency to the need for enterprises to fully understand the use case and purpose of the data store so they can answer potential questions from regulatory authorities.

Enterprises will be looking for scalable solutions so they can ensure the costs providing strong privacy capabilities and compliance with ever stricter regulations won't balloon out of control. Additionally, enterprises will increasingly invest in solutions that automate the manual tasks that human beings currently perform to support the process of end-to-end compliance regarding consumer rights under data privacy laws.

Data Automation

Customers looking to innovate fast with new configurations and ISV solutions in Salesforce and other SaaS applications will need robust solutions that can anonymize data in the sandbox with the same structure as the production environment. Enterprises will need these capabilities to safely offer up sandboxes to external parties. In these cases, the data can be anonymized en route to the sandbox or inside the sandbox if it's already present. Allowing developers to innovate faster and safer will benefit large enterprises and their adoption of Salesforce.

It's clear that data and SaaS will only grow in importance in 2023. Enterprises will react accordingly, taking measures and adopting solutions that enable them to safely, efficiently and effectively take full advantage of both.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Horton is VP of Solutions Engineering at Odaseva. He has previously served in senior architecture, engineering and sales engineering roles at SHI, OneTrust, Vodafone and VMware. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) from (ISC)2 and is a Salesforce Certified Administrator. He holds a B.S.c in Computing Systems from the University of Northampton.