The podcast is back from its summer holidays, a week earlier than expected, with this special episode looking at a problem that is often overlooked.
There is no argument that increasingly we are taking more of our business IT solutions as services, be that building platforms and infrastructure in an AWS or Azure, or whether it’s consuming specific software as a service (SaaS) solutions like Salesforce or of course the almost omnipotent Microsoft Office 365.
The benefits of taking our IT services in this way are many, flexibility, scalability, availability and the commercial attraction in taking a service under subscription.
However, many people operate their SaaS solution under the assumption that their service provider is not only providing them with a highly available infrastructure, but are also protecting all of their data by inherently providing backup and recovery facilities, protecting our data from corruption, deletion, theft or destruction and it’s a real shock to them when they find out that in reality their service provider does not do any of this.
Let’s take Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, in Microsoft’s own shared responsibility document they point out, while they are responsible for the platform YOU ARE responsible for YOUR DATA. If it is lost they are not responsible for recovering it.
It is this that is the focus of this episode as I 
caught up with Robert Cox of NetApp before he headed off to AWS summit, to talk about NetApp’s new SaaS data protection solution Cloud Control for Office 365.
We look at why SaaS solutions are popular and why the market is moving toward them and explore the risks that come with that move.
We look at why, when we move our data to a SaaS platform, there is often an abdication of responsibility for our data that would never be acceptable in our own datacentres
We discuss good practice for SaaS housed data and the kind of backup and recovery capabilities that maybe useful to us and although this episode is focused on Office 365, we also chat about why this is a challenge for a large number of SaaS services.
We wrap up by looking at what NetApp are doing in this space to help their customers protect their data.
It was great to grab Robert before he headed of to AWS summit, to discuss this often still misunderstood area by those embracing SaaS in their businesses.
If you want to know more about what NetApp are doing to help, you can find out about Cloud Control for Office365 here and also get a free trial.
If you have further questions you can of course contact me on twitter @techstringy or Robert directly at Robert.cox@netapp.com or you can find him on twitter @scoxnew.
Hope you enjoyed the show and it helps you to take control of your SaaS based data.
The podcast is back properly from its summer holidays next week, as I’m joined by a panel of tech community experts as I ask them to give their views on the current big issues facing business IT.
To catch the show, why not subscribe, and until next time, thanks for listening.
Techstringy 