User error is the leading cause of data loss in SaaS applications
- Details
- Published: Wednesday, 30 March 2016 09:01
Spanning, an EMC company, has announced the results of a survey of US and UK IT professionals, comparing the two regions in terms of software-as-a-service (SaaS) adoption, data protection and compliance.
Key among the findings is that accidental deletion of information was the leading cause of data loss from SaaS applications (43 percent US; 41 percent UK), ahead of data loss caused by malicious insiders and hackers.
Based on responses from 1,037 IT professionals in the US and UK, the data also revealed insights into who is responsible for SaaS data protection, organizational confidence in SaaS data protection and the top concerns about moving data to the cloud.
Other key findings include:
- A gap exists between perception and reality of SaaS data protection responsibility: organizations mostly rely on their SaaS vendors for backup and recovery of SaaS applications (49 percent in US, 42 percent in UK), despite the prominence of data loss due to user error (70 percent in US, 66 percent in UK), for which SaaS providers are not typically responsible. As one way to protect SaaS data, roughly a third of organizations in the US and UK are either using, or plan to use, a cloud-to-cloud backup provider for backup and recovery of their SaaS applications within the next 12 months (37 percent in US, 31 percent in UK).
- US Leads UK in SaaS data protection confidence: 80 percent of US IT pros are confident in their organization’s ability to secure SaaS application data, compared to 45 percent in the UK.
- Security is the top concern when moving critical business applications to the cloud: while organizations in both the US and UK have experienced data loss due to accidental deletions, migration errors (33 percent in US, 31 percent in UK), and accidental overwrites (27 percent in US, 26 percent in UK), they are still most concerned about external attacks (44 percent in both regions).
- US and UK differ most on security when it comes to SaaS adoption: when asked to rank differences between US and UK when it comes to SaaS adoption, security led compliance, availability of data, costs and data privacy as having the most differences.
- EU data privacy rules create costly compliance burden: the survey found that 50 percent of US and 40 percent of UK IT professionals agree that the rapidly changing EU data privacy regulations are creating a costly compliance burden. In light of the EU-US ‘Privacy Shield’ being put in place, the survey also showed opposing views of the new rules among IT professionals on both sides of the Atlantic, with those in the UK taking a more cautious approach to data sovereignty. Despite the caution, the survey also indicated that a vast majority of IT professionals agree (66 percent in the UK, 72 percent in the US) that storing data in a primary cloud provider’s EU data center / centre will ensure 100 percent compliance with data and privacy regulations.
