Spanning Report: Communication, financial top SaaS apps deployed in US, UK

by Abhinav Mohapatra

Communication and Financial SaaS applications remain the top two softwares deployed in the US and UK, according to a report published by Spanning, an EMC company known for its enterprise class data protection for Google Apps, Salesforce and Office 365.

The report, that surveyed 1,037 IT decision makers found that after Communication and Financial, Human Resource apps found third position in the UK. Meanwhile, in the US, IT Infrastructure Management found the third position.

More than half the professionals surveyed have either implemented or are moving towards a SaaS model for email/ messaging. Apart from that, most of the other SaaS application deployment trends remained the same in both the countries.

Risk factors

What was interesting to see is the topic of SaaS Data Risks and SaaS Data Protection. The survey took four sources of data loss into consideration:

  • Accidental deletion
  • Migration to a SaaS provider
  • Overwriting of wrong data
  • Hackers

Forty percent in UK and 43 percent in the US responded that the major concern for Data Loss from SaaS applications was due to accidental deletion or human error.

Data loss has occurred in 30 percent of the organizations due to migration errors, and 25 percent due to accidental overwrites. Interestingly the top concern among respondents is of external attacks and data breach during the movement of critical information and business applications to the cloud, which stands at 44 percent.

Talking about Data Protection, respondents from the US seemed more confident about securing their cloud data. Eighty per cent of the US IT professionals surveyed believed in their organization’s ability to secure cloud data, contrary to less than half of the UK respondents, standing at 45 per cent, who answered similarly.

Delving deeper into the report 49 per cent of US and 42 per cent of UK IT professionals revealed that their confidence of cloud data recovery and backup was dependent on SaaS vendors. Some 78 per cent of US respondents, and 73 percent in the UK, are aware of the standalone services that allow them to backup and restore SaaS information separate of the provider/application. Yet, only 37 percent in the US utilize them, and 31 percent in the UK.

Are you aware of the law?

Data Sovereignty was another concern. While the UK is more cautious, only 36 percent, who are responsible for SaaS purchases, are not clear about the details of the proposed changes in the Safe Harbor rules, states the Spanning report. The new rules state that the EU data must stay within the EU, which is making compliance seem as a costly affair and not as a fix for privacy.

Nevertheless, IT decision makers from both UK and US agree that the privacy policy is a burden but most still believe that storing data in a primary cloud vendor’s EU data center will ensure 100 per cent compliance with data and privacy regulations.

Both US and UK are putting more of their critical enterprise applications, employee and customer data on the cloud. Though compliance, data governance and disaster recovery are key drivers for SaaS data protection. The issues that revolve around data management and storage will depend on how the agencies and organizations tackle data sovereignty as well as the Safe Harbor agreement.