Cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) applications are becoming the standard method of deploying business functionality for many organizations. The ease of setup, low maintenance, and pay-as-you-go simplicity offer substantial benefits over traditional applications. However, SaaS apps can complicate regulatory compliance.
Government and industry regulations, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), often include data sovereignty measures restricting data storage by geographic location and have guidelines for electronic data retention. Failure to comply with these regulations can involve substantial legal and financial penalties.
SaaS applications can create difficulties for regulatory compliance because users of the applications do not have full control of their data. For example, data retention guidelines may require an organization to hold on to data for longer than the SaaS application was designed to keep the data available. Third-party backup and archiving tools offer a solution to this problem, and organizations are now finding that these tools are critical to SaaS data lifecycle management.
One common regulatory requirement is the ability to securely backup and restore SaaS data. SaaS applications generally restrict access to the underlying data storage. This limitation makes it difficult to run backups and to restore data as you would for conventional business applications. In addition, backup tools need to be aware of SaaS application metadata. Maintaining data integrity requires metadata and application data backups to be synchronized.
Salesforce is a multitenant application, meaning all Salesforce users share access to the same cloud infrastructure. To maintain overall performance, Salesforce enforces limits on backup and restore functionality. A governor restricts the amount of data retrieved through Bulk API calls used to backup data. Some data objects can only be accessed by specific APIs. During a restore of backup data, strict hierarchical reference requirements must be maintained to ensure data integrity. These and other limitations further complicate the backup and restore of Salesforce data.
AutoRABIT Vault is a purpose-built backup and data archival solution for the secure backup and recovery of Salesforce data and includes single-click recovery to any point in the past. AutoRABIT is compliant with a range of government and industry regulations. Salesforce backup data is stored in geographically disparate locations, is securely encrypted, and is immutable.
