Independent Vendor Intelligence
Purpose-Built Protection for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and the Modern SaaS Estate
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Your saas-native data protection platform platform reaches decision-makers actively evaluating solutions.
Get Featured →Comprehensive comparison framework with evaluation criteria, vendor scoring methodology, and procurement checklist.
Answer these questions to identify which platform approach suits your organisation.
1. What is your primary driver?
Data security → Veeam Backup for M365 | Operational simplicity → OwnData (Own Company)
2. What is your deployment preference?
Maximum control → Self-managed | Minimum overhead → Fully managed SaaS
3. What is your data environment?
Multi-cloud + on-prem → Hybrid platform | Cloud-only → Cloud-native platform
SaaS providers protect infrastructure, not your data. Microsoft's own agreement recommends regular backup. 41% of SaaS data loss is caused by accidental user deletion that native tools cannot fully recover.
The majority of enterprise data has migrated to SaaS applications. Protecting on-premises infrastructure without protecting SaaS data leaves the majority of business-critical information unprotected.
Ransomware propagates to SaaS through desktop sync clients, compromised accounts, and OAuth token abuse. Independent backup is the recovery mechanism when SaaS data is encrypted or destroyed.
GDPR, financial regulations, and legal hold requirements mandate data retention beyond SaaS provider native capabilities. Independent backup with flexible retention policies satisfies these obligations.
In-depth analysis for buyers evaluating saas-native data protection platforms.
Every major SaaS provider operates under a shared responsibility model: the provider protects the infrastructure and application availability, but the customer is responsible for protecting their data within the application. Microsoft's own service agreement explicitly states that they 'recommend that you regularly backup your content and data.' Yet the majority of organisations assume that SaaS means their data is automatically protected. This assumption is the SaaS shared responsibility gap — and it leads to unrecoverable data loss.
The gap manifests in specific scenarios that SaaS providers do not protect against: accidental deletion by users (responsible for 41% of SaaS data loss), malicious deletion by disgruntled employees or compromised accounts, ransomware that encrypts cloud data through synchronised desktop clients, retention policy misconfiguration that permanently deletes data beyond recovery, and third-party application integration errors that overwrite or corrupt data. SaaS-native data protection platforms close this gap by maintaining independent copies of SaaS data under the customer's control.
Microsoft 365 provides native retention capabilities — the Recycle Bin (93 days for SharePoint), litigation hold, and retention policies. For many organisations, these native capabilities create a false sense of security. The Recycle Bin has time limits after which data is permanently unrecoverable. Litigation hold preserves data but was designed for legal discovery, not operational recovery — restoring from hold is complex and slow. Retention policies require careful configuration and do not protect against administrative errors that disable them.
SaaS-native backup for Microsoft 365 provides independent, point-in-time recoverable copies of all M365 data — mailboxes, SharePoint sites, OneDrive files, Teams conversations, and Planner boards. Unlike native retention, backup provides unlimited retention duration, granular point-in-time recovery, and protection against administrative errors and tenant-level compromise. For organisations where M365 is the primary productivity platform, dedicated backup is the most critical data protection investment after the M365 subscription itself.
Buyer's Note: When evaluating saas-native data protection platforms, request a proof-of-concept deployment against your actual environment. Vendor demonstrations using sanitised demo data do not reveal how the platform performs with your specific infrastructure, data volumes, and compliance requirements.
Salesforce presents unique data protection challenges that generic backup tools cannot address. Salesforce data is highly relational — objects contain lookups, master-detail relationships, and formula fields that create complex dependency chains. Backing up a Salesforce org requires understanding these relationships to ensure recoverable data, not just flat record exports. Restoring a single Account record may require restoring its related Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, and custom objects in the correct order to maintain referential integrity.
Additionally, Salesforce metadata — custom fields, workflows, validation rules, page layouts, and Apex code — changes continuously as administrators and developers customise the platform. A data protection solution that only backs up data records without capturing metadata cannot restore an org to a consistent state. When evaluating Salesforce data protection, assess the depth of metadata capture and the platform's understanding of Salesforce's relational data model — these capabilities separate Salesforce-native solutions from generic backup tools.
Enterprise SaaS usage extends far beyond Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce. ServiceNow contains IT service management data. Workday holds HR and financial records. HubSpot stores marketing and CRM data. Slack archives years of business communications. Each SaaS application contains business-critical data that the organisation is responsible for protecting under the shared responsibility model.
The challenge for data protection is coverage breadth. No single SaaS backup platform covers every SaaS application, and the market is fragmented between specialists (Veeam for M365, Own for Salesforce) and generalists attempting broad coverage. The strategic approach is to identify your Tier 1 SaaS applications — those whose data loss would cause significant business disruption — and ensure each has dedicated, depth-appropriate protection. Generic backup that covers 20 apps superficially is less valuable than deep protection for the 3-5 apps that contain your most critical data.
GenAI Warning: Organisations deploying GenAI are generating and processing unprecedented data volumes. Ensure your data protection platform can scale to protect AI training data, model artifacts, and the sensitive data that GenAI workloads ingest.
When SaaS data is backed up, where does the backup reside? For organisations subject to data sovereignty requirements — GDPR data residency, financial services regulatory expectations, government data handling requirements — the location of backup data is a compliance consideration. Fully managed SaaS backup solutions may store data in regions the customer cannot control or verify, creating potential compliance conflicts.
Platforms offering flexible deployment — customer-managed backup storage in specific cloud regions or on-premises — provide the data sovereignty control that regulated industries require. Veeam's architecture, for example, allows organisations to store M365 backup data in their own Azure subscription, AWS account, or on-premises infrastructure, maintaining full control over data location and access. When evaluating SaaS backup platforms, map your data sovereignty requirements against each vendor's storage location options before committing.
Beyond disaster recovery, SaaS backup data has operational value. Salesforce development teams need realistic sandbox environments for testing — but refreshing sandboxes from production is slow, limited in frequency, and may not include the specific data subset needed for testing. SaaS data protection platforms that enable sandbox seeding from backup data transform data protection into a development productivity tool, enabling developers to create targeted test environments on demand.
This operational value changes the ROI equation for SaaS data protection. Instead of justifying the platform solely on disaster recovery — an insurance policy that hopefully never pays out — the sandbox seeding capability delivers daily productivity value to development and QA teams. When building the business case for SaaS data protection, quantify both the risk mitigation value and the operational productivity value to present a compelling investment case.
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Enquire About Featured Positions →Our vendor assessments are based on independent technical evaluation, verified customer feedback, analyst reports, and publicly available performance data. No vendor pays for placement or influences ratings. Featured positions are clearly marked and do not affect editorial scoring. Our methodology is published and available upon request.