Edward A. Murphy Jr., an aerospace engineer, coined the phrase "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong" back in the 1940s.
I experienced Murphy’s Law firsthand during my time as a help desk manager working for an MSP in the late ’90s. One morning, I walked into the office to find an ashen-faced admin struggling to mount a corrupted hard drive. The failure had occurred the very same night he had forgotten to initiate a backup to a DAT tape—a small oversight with far-reaching and expensive repercussions.
Fast forward to today, where approximately 60% of SMBs manage workloads and store data in the public cloud, trusting platforms like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 to keep their data safe. Surely, these SaaS providers guarantee the protection of your data, right? Wrong.
The Shared Responsibility Model means SaaS providers manage infrastructure, but customers are responsible for protecting their own data.
The growing threat of SaaS data loss
Despite the reliability of SaaS platforms, data loss remains a serious concern, with 70% of organizations reporting incidents in the past year.
Here are three sobering real-world examples that highlight the risks:
- UniSuper’s Google Cloud Disaster: In May 2024, Google Cloud accidentally deleted the entire account of UniSuper, a $135 billion Australian pension fund. This error also wiped out all backups stored on the platform.
- KPMG admin error: During the chaos of the 2020 pandemic, a Microsoft 365 admin at KPMG unintentionally misconfigured retention policies resulting in the deletion of months of critical Teams chat data for 145,000 employees.
- Google Synchronization Failure: An issue reported on Google's support forums revealed that users’ data and folder structures were suddenly disappearing due to a system synchronization failure.
Additionally, 83% of organizations report that human error has caused SaaS data loss, whether from accidental deletion, overwriting, modification of data, security flaws, account deactivations, or regulatory data purges.
Why SaaS providers’ backups aren’t enough
SMB clients often ask, “Doesn’t Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace back up our data?” Unfortunately, the answer is: well, kind of. And native SaaS backup products come with significant risks:
- Limited Retention: Microsoft 365, for example, retains deleted items for only 30 days. If an issue isn’t caught in time, the data is gone forever.
- Slow Recovery: Restoring data from SaaS platforms can take days or weeks, leading to costly downtime.
- Vendor Lock-In Risks: SaaS vendors like Microsoft offer their own backup solutions, but keeping backups within the same platform increases dependency. If the platform experiences an outage or failure, both the primary data and the backups could become inaccessible.
The 3-2-1 backup rule—which includes storing backups across independent platforms—is a proven strategy for reducing risk. This is where a third-party backup solution like OpenText Core Cloud-to-Cloud Backup (formerly known as Carbonite Cloud-to-Cloud Backup) becomes essential.
The ROI of effective backups
Backups can be the difference between business survival and failure. Consider these findings from AT-Bay’s cyber insurance study:
- Businesses that restore from backups are three times less likely to pay ransom compared to those without backups.
- Effective backups can reduce the cost of ransomware claims by 41%.
- SMBs without backups face an added $190,000 in recovery costs after a ransomware attack.
The Solution: OpenText Core Cloud-to-Cloud Backup
OpenText™ Core Cloud-to-Cloud Backup enables your clients to:
- Recover critical data within minutes, minimizing downtime and business disruption.
- *Avoid paying ransom by leveraging secure, immutable backups.
- Potentially reduce their cyber insurance premiums by up to 25%.
*This, of course, does not apply to double-extortion ransomware, where threat actors not only encrypt sensitive data but also threaten to expose it publicly.
5 reasons why MSPs are choosing OpenText Core Cloud-to-Cloud Backup
1. Comprehensive SaaS Coverage
OpenText protects data across leading SaaS platforms, ensuring coverage for:
- Microsoft 365: Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Groups.
- Google Workspace: Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Contacts.
- Salesforce, Dropbox, and Box.
2. Ease of Use
With a centralized management portal, OpenText simplifies oversight of backup statuses. Features like flexible reporting, CSV exports, and compliance-ready tools make data protection intuitive and transparent.
3. Flexible Storage Options
OpenText Core Cloud-to-Cloud Backup supports unlimited storage and retention as well as Bring Your Own Storage (BYOS), allowing MSPs to store backups on AWS, Azure, GCP, or AWS-compatible solutions.
4. OpenText offers granular recovery options, allowing MSPs to restore specific files without disrupting other data. With AES-256 encrypted, immutable storage, optional Object-Lock, and MFA, backups are safeguarded against ransomware attacks.
5. Transparent, Scalable Billing
OpenText usage-based billing aligns costs with actual consumption, eliminating manual license management and ensuring pricing scales with business growth.
These features, combined with global data centers for compliance, customizable retention policies to meet regulatory mandates, API and SIEM integration, and 24/7 real-time support, position OpenText Core Cloud-to-Cloud Backup as the go-to choice for MSPs seeking reliable and secure SaaS data protection.
A Trusted Solution: OpenText Core Cloud-to-Cloud Backup from an MSP perspective
“We love Carbonite [OpenText Core] Cloud-to-Cloud Backup as it is a simple ‘set and forget’ solution, unlike traditional backup tools.”
- George Lakiotis, CEO, Symmetric IT Group:
Read the full testimonial here.
Protect your SMB clients from serious SaaS data loss today
Murphy’s Law is alive and well—bad things will happen—but with OpenText Core Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, you can ensure fast data recovery, streamline billing, boost revenue, and build client trust.
Learn how OpenText Core Cloud-to-Cloud Backup can protect your clients’ SaaS data and enhance your service offerings.
