Privacy Regulations and their Impact on SaaS Data Backup, Like Salesforce

Whether you are a B2C, D2C, B2B, or B2G company, you create SaaS data that falls under privacy laws. Although there is no one-size-fits-all data privacy approach, companies should understand how this data is being collected, used, retained, and safeguarded across their organization and with their partners. Companies should also leverage the fields/attributes offered by their SaaS apps. For example, Salesforce offers data fields such as “Block Geolocation Tracking”, “Don’t Process Preference” and “Don’t Profile Preference”.

Key Questions: SaaS Data Backup and Privacy

Commercially available SaaS data backup and replication solutions are also evolving to provide richer data management tools to meet these requirements. But before you consider or reconsider your SaaS backup solution, you should ask yourself these key questions:

• Do you know your SaaS apps’ data privacy fields/attributes?
• Have you created customs fields, rules, and reports to meet the requirements?
• Are the proper data workflows in place both for internal and external processing?
• Has the data been combined with other sets of data?
• If you had to delete a customer’s records, would you be confident that you are meeting privacy requirements?
• Are you creating an audit trail?

[Learn what data needs to be retained in our guide.]

How Can SaaS Backup and Replication Apps Help?

From the ever-evolving CCPA requirements to GDPR, COPPA and HIPAA, leveraging backup and replication these tools can help make the process easier. One key way SaaS backup solutions are helping to meet regulations is the one-click “Right to Be Forgotten” feature found in many of today’s solutions. It allows database admins to remove the needed data across not only the current backup but all iterations.

Other tools can help you to replicate only the data needed, based on your anonymization requirements, before it hits your data lakes, data warehouses or other systems for BI, AI or ML initiatives. Understanding your data, where it propagates and how much should be ported over to systems is now arguably the greatest challenge of data stewards.

Partnering with Data Management App Providers

Why not also have a conversation with your data management solutions provider? They may have run into the same challenges with other customers and can share some best practices from their work in the field.