Enterprises are turning to applications outside the firewall, with SaaS solutions like Slack and Microsoft Teams becoming increasingly important. At the same time, these applications attract just the type of corporate data (chat, files, and workflows) that can place organizations at legal or operational risk. They’re also using cloud-based automation tools like ServiceNow and Okta, and even running applications in Amazon AWS. That’s why it’s a good thing that data protection providers like Druva are adding support for this “outside the firewall” data.
Is It Better with SaaS?
Businesses have reaped great rewards by using advanced collaboration tools like Slack and Office 365. These tools enhance communication and enable distributed and cross-functional teams to coordinate and collaborate like never before. The same is true of automation platforms that integrate with enterprise processes, including ServiceNow, Okta, and Splunk. Many companies would find it hard to operate without these tools.
The nature of collaboration tools means they tend to attract critical business data, including messaging and files. Indeed, organizations encourage users to treat these systems as repositories of corporate knowledge. Many companies post corporate policies in Slack or Microsoft Teams and use automation systems to track employee activities from tasks to vacations to sick time. Automation systems also enable legal compliance and HR assessment, and they need to integrate smoothly with data protection suites to ensure that everything is protected.
This data is critical to operations, and it is extremely sensitive legally. Most companies would be unable to function if their collaboration systems were unavailable or if the data stored there was lost. And most legal cases turn on the mundane daily activities of users, not the type of data stored in the enterprise datacenter.
The Need to Protect Collaboration Data
What are companies to do then when confronted by the criticality and sensitivity of data stored in SaaS providers like Slack and Microsoft? This is where Druva comes in. The latest enhancements to their data protection solution cover a wide variety of popular SaaS applications.
Druva just announced enhanced support for “outside the firewall” applications:
- Slack data is preserved for operational and legal use
- Microsoft Office 365 support now covers Microsoft Teams as well, protecting this data
- Users of Okta, Splunk, and ServiceNow can increasingly integrate with Druva, enabling some automation of data protection along and enterprise processes
This is a critical feature for companies that make heavy use of collaboration and automation platforms. And it reflects the new reality that corporate data exists in SaaS as well as the datacenter.
Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh discusses disaster recovery as a service at Tech Field Day in June
Amazon AWS + Disaster Recovery
At Tech Field Day in June, Druva announced Phoenix DR as a Service for VMware workloads. This allows on-premises virtualized servers to fail over to Amazon AWS in the event of a disaster. This capability would pay for itself, considering the cost of maintaining a DR site!
But a question came up about failing back after disaster recovery. The initial release didn’t make it quite as simple to restore operations inside the datacenter after a disaster. The good news is that the latest version includes fail-back! It’s great to see Druva iterating and evolving their DR as a Service offering so quickly.
Another new feature focuses on workloads running in Amazon AWS. Druva can now manage disaster recovery between AWS regions and accounts, including coordination of RDS data using AWS native tools. This is an exciting addition and shows the importance of Amazon AWS workloads in the modern enterprise. The Druva solution can also support dev/test use cases, allowing a complete AWS workload to be copied to another region or account.
Stephen’s Stance
With enterprises increasingly relying on SaaS applications like Microsoft Teams and Slack for collaboration, it’s a good thing that data protection suites like Druva are available. These systems contain critical business data and must be protected. Integration with ServiceNow, Okta, and Splunk helps ensure that all data is protected, even as organizations evolve. And the support for Amazon AWS disaster recovery is a welcome enhancement. This is a good move for Druva, and businesses would be wise to implement this protection.
