Users Demand SaaS 'Data Escrow' Services

85 Per Cent of SaaS Users Want to Keep a Copy of Their Data

SAN JOSE, California, December 15 - Eighty five per cent of companies embracing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
applications want to keep a copy of their data outside of their SaaS vendor's
offering, according to new research commissioned by RainStor, an
infrastructure software company that provides the leading repository for
historical structured data.

"All companies want to keep a copy of important data within their
business applications, and it's no different for those using SaaS. Typically
it's either as a best practice fail-safe, to protect data and meet compliance
requirements or to run advanced analytics without impacting the production
environment," says Andy Ben-Dyke, CTO at RainStor.

According to the research, the primary drivers for keeping a copy of SaaS
data are to:

    - Protect against data loss or corruption by the SaaS application vendor
      (46%)
    - Protect against data loss or corruption by end-users (42%)
    - Improve data availability should the SaaS vendor or end-user suffer web
      outage (30%)
    - Enable improved reporting and analytics beyond the capability of the
      SaaS offering (25%)
    - Satisfy internal data governance policies (20%)
    - Satisfy external legal or regulatory mandates (9%)

The findings show that 43 per cent of companies currently use a SaaS
application, with a further 39 per cent planning to use SaaS in the
foreseeable future. Of those companies using, or intending to use, SaaS
applications 90 per cent wanted to keep their own copy of SaaS data with
another third party cloud provider.

"For companies using SaaS, it's natural that they would want to keep a
copy of their SaaS data in another cloud but separate from their SaaS
vendor," adds Ben-Dyke. "It's an approach coined SaaS data escrow; the safe
keeping of SaaS data with a trusted third party. While the desire to keep
copies of SaaS data has existed for a while, it's only the emergence of
simple and secure cloud-based data management technologies that have made
this possible"

The research is based on a sample of 400 senior IT decision makers,
across the US (300) and the UK (100), working within commercial organisations
with 500 to 5000 employees.

The research report is available to download from: bit.ly/5MYjbc

About RainStor

RainStor is a technology pioneer in online information preservation. The
company's specialized data repository significantly reduces the total cost of
preserving information through extreme data compression, simplified data
management and near-perfect scalability on commodity hardware. RainStor
enables partners including Informatica, Adaptive Mobile and OnPoint
Technologies to deliver online data retention solutions that reduce the cost
and complexity of preserving information in the enterprise or the cloud.
RainStor is the optimal data management and storage technology for
application archiving, application retirement, SaaS Data Escrow(TM), and log
and security event management solutions.

RainStor is a privately held company with offices in San Francisco, USA
and Gloucester, UK. For more information, visit www.rainstor.com

    Contact details

    Richard Botley, Chameleon PR
    Tel: +44(0)207-680-5500
    Email: richard.botley@chameleonpr.com

Contact details: Richard Botley, Chameleon PR, Tel: +44(0)207-680-5500, Email: richard.botley at chameleonpr.com