What are you doing to back up cloud data in real time to ensure there's some redundancy?
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I bought Gearset to back up my Salesforce configuration because there are certain components of things that they don't back up. A company like OwnBackup or Gearset is still necessary because Salesforce could still fail. Your point is well-taken, but it's still not a 100% insurance policy.
But generally they will invest way more than I could. And then we always have full copy sandboxes, etc. We also pull some data from it to pump into the data warehouse, so we can mine some information together. There are always the partial copies. <br><br>The reality is that with the big providers, you are captive. At least in my career, I haven't seen anybody moving away from Salesforce or Workday to some other solution. I've migrated Rapid7, and we migrated from NetSuite to Workday for the HR system. We got all our data from NetSuite, cleansed it and then we injected that into Workday, so there are ways of getting it. The sad reality is that the more complex the data is, the more captive you are, especially with the big providers. <br><br>It's very difficult to even get access to your data because sometimes, when you need access, they will throttle the number of API calls you can make to get it right. They have their own ways of safeguarding their interests, but that's the economy we live in. And some CIOs think, "It makes my life easier, so this is meeting the needs of the business well. Let’s keep going." But when you have 50 SaaS applications in your environment, you're relying on the vendors to do backups.
Back in the day I don't think any CIO slept well until they knew that they had a backup of their core systems located someplace other than where the original data systems were. You needed to have those backups. Now that we’ve moved to cloud providers, we are trusting them to not only provide primary storage for everything we do, but also backup storage. One of the things that I'm finding challenging is attempting to back up some of this stuff ourselves, so that we know we have some redundancy.
There are companies that will do this, but the cost is insane. You have to figure out how many individuals you want to back up and the vendors always suggest backing up the president and executive team, but that's not where the most important data is in my organization. It lives with the individual contributors who are doing the day-to-day work, so how would we pick which accounts to back up? The vendors know they can charge because it's not easy for anybody else to do and I can't easily do it myself.
It’s even a challenge to find companies that will do this because not every vendor in the cloud exposes data in a way that it can be easily backed up. Most of the vendors we talk to will do Office 365 and Google, but when we explain that we're a Workday client, they’ll say, "Well, nobody backs up Workday." We're stuck because all of our ERP data is in Workday. They've got primary and secondary storage. I know their architecture, I can read their compliance reports and we can look at all this stuff in uptime. But ultimately, we've trusted one company to have all of our primary data, and we trust that they're backing it up as well. That's making me nervous as more of our departments trust cloud providers, which is where everything's going. I have no access to that data in any meaningful way. We do negotiate data retrieval clauses in all of our contracts, so we have the right to get all of our data back within X number of days of ending a contract. But I don't have any idea what format that data will be in. Will I be doing anything with it? It shows that the company is willing to at least acknowledge that that's an issue.
I've never thought about duplicating my cloud, which should already be backed up for me. But that's a fair point and a gap in our overall thought processes. My play in that situation would be to do a complete failover into my dev or sandbox environment. I’d want to do that at some point in time, have that as part of my disaster recovery (DR) plan and contract it so that the vendor can prove to me that it works.
I've been fighting to get budget approval to backup cloud data for four years and I haven't succeeded. And I thought I had the winning argument after we were almost held ransom by a cloud vendor. The vendor said, "We think you’re using a lot of the product because we can see your domain and it has a lot of accounts." I asked them to send me a list but they said they couldn’t do that because it violates the terms and conditions. They told me I would need to figure out who's using it internally myself.<br><br>I asked them what I should do and they said, "You can set up an enterprise account and then you can restrict access. It costs 360% more." They wouldn't tell me who holds the accounts and, as far as I could tell, I didn't own the data until I moved it into an enterprise agreement. And even if I implement an enterprise agreement, when your account says, "Chris has now set up an enterprise, you have to move over," you get two options — move or export to Gmail. It's super dodgy. We ended up going with an enterprise agreement, but it was a terrible experience.
There's the local storage of information, which is on the desktop. When I was on the corporate side, we used to dump it from the desktops into our storage for local files. As far as the cloud goes, you have to look at it from a business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) perspective. Salesforce, for example, is going to invest way more in backups than I ever would. My confidence level is higher because they are a $15B company and it's their business model, so they will have a way higher level of redundancy and backups than I will.