Data in the cloud is safe. This is one of the most dangerous myths in IT – which is regularly verified by painful reality when an organization discovers that its Salesforce, HubSpot or Jira data has been accidentally deleted, and the SaaS provider does not have a granular backup to restore a specific record from yesterday. Skyvia Backup is a solution that fills this gap – automatic, scheduled archiving of data from popular SaaS applications to a secure repository in the cloud.
Table of contents
- Why does SaaS data need a separate backup?
- What is Skyvia Backup and how does it work?
- What SaaS applications does Skyvia Backup support?
- Automation and scheduling of archiving
- Granular data restoration
- Security and backup storage
- Key findings
- FAQ
- Summary
Why does SaaS data need a separate backup?
SaaS providers protect the infrastructure – servers, data centers, service availability. However, they don’t protect the data from user errors, malicious employee actions, integration configuration errors or mass deletion of records by faulty automation. This is the so-called “shared responsibility model” – and many organizations discover its implications only when trying to restore deleted data.
Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Zendesk, Pipedrive – each of these platforms has built-in recycle bin or versioning mechanisms, but with a limited retention time window (typically 15-90 days) and without the ability to selectively restore a specific state of data from a specific point in time. If an integration error overwrote thousands of CRM records 3 months ago and you just discovered this – the SaaS vendor’s native backup tools won’t help you.
Skyvia Backup solves this problem by independently, automatically archiving data outside the SaaS platform, with granular restores to a specific point in time.
What is Skyvia Backup and how does it work?
Skyvia Backup is a cloud-to-cloud backup service – it takes data from SaaS applications via their API and stores it in a secure repository. The whole thing works without software installation, without agents, through a browser. Setup consists of connecting a Skyvia account to an account in a protected application via OAuth, selecting objects to be backed up and setting a schedule.
Data is downloaded incrementally – after the first full backup, each subsequent session downloads only the changes since the last backup. This reduces the duration of the backup and the consumption of SaaS application API resources. Each backup session creates a new “snapshot” (snapshot) of the data state – allowing restoration to any point in time covered by the backup retention policy.
What SaaS applications does Skyvia Backup support?
Skyvia Backup supports a wide catalog of popular SaaS applications. In the CRM and sales area: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM. In the area of project management and ticketing: Jira, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Basecamp. In the area of e-commerce: Shopify. In the area of databases and storage: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Google BigQuery, Amazon RDS.
Salesforce is a particularly important case – CRM data containing the history of customers, contracts and sales opportunities is a key asset for many organizations. Losing this data or corrupting it through faulty integration can have serious business consequences. Skyvia archives the full Salesforce schema – all standard and custom objects, relationships and metadata.
Automation and scheduling of archiving
A manual backup is not a backup – it’s just a one-time copy, the value of which decreases every day. Skyvia Backup works in automatic mode with configurable schedules: daily, every few hours or even hourly for critical data.
The schedule is defined through a web interface – no scripting, no schedule management by cron or Windows Task Scheduler. Each scheduled session is logged with information on status (success/error), number of processed records and duration. Email alerts notify you of failed backup sessions.
Integration with other Ramsdata solutions and software enables building a comprehensive data protection ecosystem – from backup to synchronization to application integration.
Granular data restoration
Granular restore is a key advantage of Skyvia Backup over native SaaS backup. Instead of an “all or nothing” restore, Skyvia allows you to:
Restore a specific record to its state from a specific point in time – for example, a specific sales opportunity in Salesforce to its state from the previous week, when it had the right data before the integration overwrote it.
Restore a set of records that meet the criteria – for example, all contacts from a specific segment that were deleted by an erroneous automation.
Export data from a specific snapshot to CSV or JSON – for analysis or manual import into the target application.
Preview historical versions of data without restoring – which allows you to first make sure that the restored state is correct before actually replacing the current data.
Security and backup storage
Skyvia archived data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest (AES-256). The backup repository is isolated from the source application – compromising a Salesforce account does not automatically mean losing the backup. Data is stored in ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliant data centers.
The backup retention policy is configurable – Skyvia allows snapshots to be stored for 3 months, 6 months, a year or longer depending on the plan chosen and the organization’s regulatory requirements. For data covered by GDPR, it is important to be able to specify the region of data storage – Skyvia offers data centers in the EU.
Key findings
- SaaS “shared responsibility model” means that the provider protects the infrastructure, but not the data from user errors – the organization needs its own backup.
- Skyvia Backup works without agents, through a browser, with automatic scheduling and incremental data retrieval.
- Supported platforms include Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Zendesk, Pipedrive and databases.
- Granular restoration allows you to restore a specific record from a specific point in time – without having to restore the entire database.
- The backup data is AES-256 encrypted, stored in an isolated repository with a selectable EU region.
FAQ
Does Skyvia Backup affect SaaS application performance during archiving? Skyvia retrieves data via the application API with rate limiting. Incremental backups are minimally invasive – usually imperceptible to application users.
How long does it take to restore data from Skyvia Backup? Restoring a single record is a matter of seconds. Restoring a large data set (tens of thousands of records) can take several minutes.
Does Skyvia Backup meet the requirements of the GDPR? Yes – Skyvia offers data storage in data centers in the EU, data encryption and the ability to export or delete a specific person’s data to fulfill GDPR rights.
Is it possible to rebase custom objects and fields in Salesforce? Yes – Skyvia archives both standard and custom objects and fields in Salesforce, including relationships between objects.
Summary
Backup of data from SaaS applications is just as important as backup of on-premises systems – except that organizations often find out about this when data is lost. Skyvia Backup provides a simple, automatic and reliable solution to this problem, without having to build your own backup infrastructure. Contact Ramsdata to learn how Skyvia can protect your organization’s data in SaaS applications.
