Keepit brings backup and restore to unprotected SaaS applications

Organisations often use up to 200 different cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, and should be able to back them up with one product.

That’s the view of cloud-to-cloud SaaS application backup provider Keepit, which aims to allow customers to quickly add the ability to protect SaaS application data.

That comes on top of the basic need to backup SaaS data, which by default is largely unprotected, with hundreds of millions of users’ data not backed up.

“SaaS applications were never built for backup and don’t have backup,” said Keepit chief technology officer Jakob Østergaard. “If someone gets infected by ransomware, the shared responsibility model means the cloud provider can’t help with that. If Microsoft has a hard drive fail, they absolutely will not lose your data, but if someone compromises data, they won’t solve this. And 90% of customers on Microsoft 365, for example, have no backup. That’s 100 million seats with no backup, and in the context where the EU [European Union] will soon legally oblige companies to do so.”

Keepit is one of a number of SaaS – or cloud-to-cloud backup – products and services that have arisen to fill the gap left by cloud providers not offering real backup natively for SaaS apps.

A key feature of Denmark-based Keepit is that it runs its own datacentre capacity, so all backups are independently held away from where source SaaS applications reside.

“We run our own object stores because we want backups to be separate from where primary date comes from so that a cloud outage doesn’t make the backup unavailable,” said Østergaard. “Otherwise, if you backed up 365, it couldn’t be held in Azure, likewise with G-Suite and GCP, or Salesforce and AWS. So, we decided not to host data in the public cloud.”

Keepit has regions based around datacentre capacity in Copenhagen, Frankfurt, London, Zurich, Sydney, Toronto and Washington DC. Each region is treated as a sovereign availability zone with no data moved between them unless approved by the customer. Each region has two active-active datacentres with full-site failover between them. Keepit does not charge for ingress, egress or capacity, but charges by the seat.

Data can be protected on Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics, Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), Google Workspace, Salesforce.com, Azure DevOps, Power Platform and ZenDesk. “It’s built from the ground up as a cloud backup product,” said Ostergaard.

Keepit backup is designed to run one or two times a day on an incremental forever schema. It is possible to see individual files and preview them, but that depends on the workload.

“In Salesforce there’s no full UI, but customers get a view of contents,” said Østergaard. “No SaaS app is built with backup in mind, but we can give object-level granularity.”

Supporting cloud services

Østergaard said Keepit had been seen as a point solution for Microsoft 365, but it now supports multiple SaaS services and plans to make it easy for customers who might be running up to 200 cloud services to add any one of those couple of hundred SaaS applications.

“The intention is that we will much more quickly support modern cloud services,” he said. “We’ve built a layer onto the backup engine to enable very quick support for new workloads. That’s the direction we’re going, but it’s just the beginning, and we have that capability with a handful of SaaS applications for now. The plan is to expand that in the coming months.”

“It’ll be a game-changer,” said Østergaard. “We expect to be able to support 90% of that 200. Starting in summer 2024, we will have the ability for Keepit to add new applications, but in the long-term, it will be customers and developers that do that.”