No matter your industry, if you use SaaS applications, a “SaaS data backup and recovery plan” belongs at the top of your to-do list. If you have already checked that box, you’re in good company among the estimated 15% of organizations that already make backing up SaaS data a priority. With 75% of organizations expected to make SaaS backup a priority by 2028, the closer you can get this item to the top of your list, the better.
Why organizations need a SaaS backup plan
While SaaS applications have a backup and recovery plan for platform data, the Shared Responsibility Model for SaaS data is universal across SaaS applications. This rule makes it very clear: it’s your responsibility to back up the data stored in the SaaS apps your business relies on. When you lose data in a SaaS platform—whether it’s to an accidental deletion, a migration gone wrong, or something more malicious—the SaaS platform can’t help you bring it back. You need your own backup and recovery plan.
If you have compliance requirements to meet, backing up your critical SaaS data isn’t just a best practice, it’s a must. HIPAA, DORA, ISO 27001 and other mandatory and voluntary compliance frameworks clearly state that you need to securely back up data, and you need to be able to recover it in the event of loss. Meeting backup requirements in a compliance audit is just one way backups support your overall compliance strategy.
But compliance is about much more than checking a box. Meeting compliance regulations improves overall resilience and security posture, helping organizations to:
- Reduce security and privacy risks
- Strengthen control of key processes
- Align cybersecurity requirements with business processes
- Better understand the goals of cybersecurity and how to handle business security challenges
- Maintain effective cybersecurity programs
- Build customer trust and improve company reputation
Organizations must back up information that’s vulnerable to threats like software or hardware failures, attack, or simple human error. Any one of these problems could potentially lead to data loss, system malfunctions, financial losses, and reputational damage. In this post, you’ll learn more about why data backups are an important part of compliance, the benefits of a SaaS backup strategy, and how backups support compliance.
Why are backups important for compliance?
Regulations like GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, along with others, were created to ensure that organizations implement the most reliable methods to secure all types of sensitive data from infrastructure failures and malicious attacks. Compliance can’t be achieved unless an organization handles data in a way that adheres to the outlined regulations.
Standards and attestations like ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are considered the most thorough audits an organization can go through to prove they have taken all the necessary steps to protect business and user data. Unlike the regulations mentioned above, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 aren’t legal requirements, but they’re especially beneficial to SaaS companies, data centers, and organizations that deal with sensitive information. They make it very clear that the company takes data security seriously and considers it a top priority. By properly implementing the data and privacy controls required, you can increase reliability and user trust, as well as gain a competitive advantage over other companies.
To be able to achieve a successful audit and comply with regulations and different compliance frameworks in general, you’ll have to maintain robust, up-to-date backup processes that ensure data is always protected, but also available to users—even in cases of unexpected events, like natural disasters, cyberattacks, and human error. In other words, compliance means having backup processes at the core of your business continuity plan, and the data backup tools you are using must be able to handle your backup processes.
Backups, of course, do more than enhance business continuity, as mentioned above. Although they can’t prevent an attack or a data loss from happening, they’re an integral part of your overall security strategy, since they allow you to restore lost or corrupted information, mitigating the consequences of such an event.
There’s no fixed rule for how frequently you should back up but ideally, to secure valuable information, you should implement a combination of full and partial backups as often as possible. Fortunately, great data backup solutions can handle this complex but crucial task with efficiency.
The difference between backups and compliance
Backups and data availability are just one of the many requirements for a company to meet compliance standards. It’s an important part, but it’s not enough on its own. Being compliant isn’t a quick and easy process that you can decide to start and then finish a month later. It’s a time-consuming process that will require buy-in from every member of your team, and will ultimately involve in-depth assessments of the systems, processes, and controls across your entire business.
Although each compliance framework is slightly different, all of them require a company to implement a wide range of security procedures. For example:
- Structure your organization in a way that allows optimal management of the services you provide.
- Have a strong disaster recovery plan.
- Communicate in detail with users about how your system works, your security policies, and processes.
- Perform risk assessments regularly to identify risks, measure their impact, and create a plan to address them quickly and effectively.
- Continuously monitor your security controls to verify they’re operating as expected.
- Make adjustments as needed to stay ahead of the latest security threats.
- Control physical access to your devices, and prevent unauthorized access to your systems.
- Integrate best practice security procedures into your day-to-day workflows.
- Optimize system operations to detect vulnerabilities early and respond to security incidents effectively.
- Clearly describe how you handle changes in your infrastructure to ensure that they won’t affect your business operations.
The above is far from an exhaustive list that will guarantee you are “compliant.” There are numerous criteria you need to fulfill. Although compliance might seem a huge undertaking (and it can be) the benefits are worth the effort.
As the security risks in the technology world are constantly changing and becoming more sophisticated, organizations must be able to deal with them or face the consequences. Following security standards is a necessity for businesses that want to protect their customers and themselves.
Conclusion: How backups support compliance
Having a reliable data backup strategy is a crucial step for compliance and ensuring business continuity. Fortunately, there are top-notch data backup tools that can make this complex process easier. The best backup and recovery tools support compliance with regular backups and state-preserving restore and include important security features like role based access control (RBAC), bring your own key (BYOK), data residency options, and more.
Rewind is a complete data backup and recovery solution for businesses and offers backup and restore for more than a dozen platforms across software development, ecommerce, accounting, and productivity. Rewind is fully compliant with the GDPR and has achieved SOC 2 Type 2 compliance. We expect to achieve ISO 27001 attestation in June, 2025. This ensures that your business data is properly protected, and your backups follow the strictest security standards.
With Rewind’s automated daily backups and state-preserving data restoration, you can minimize the consequences of potential data loss and keep your business running smoothly.
Get started with Rewind with a 14-day free trial or book a demo to learn more about how backups can mitigate risk, build resilience, and support compliance for your organization.
