While specific apps to provide core Microsoft and Google office product are becoming more common, they are far from ubiquitous and most apps have no or tiny amounts of software protection for them.

Data protection as-a-service provider HYCU has announced the availability of R-Cloud, a different type of SaaS backup offering than they, or anyone in the market, has offered previously. R-Cloud uses a low code environment and partnerships with vendors with capabilities to autodiscover SaaaS applications in order to protect customers wiith a scalable and simple to create offering

“What we were realizing is that the number of places where customers have data, which we want to protect, is expanding rapidly,” said Subbiah Sundaram, Senior Vice President, Products at HYCU. “We realized that we could cover all that was located on-prem and and on public cloud infrastructure. But lots were going to SaaS. We ourselves have over 60 SaaS apps and we are a younger organization. Larger ones can have numbers way up between 45,000 and 60,000. How do we protect them”

Sundaram said that their data indicate that SaaS application are generally unprotected. Of the more than 17,000 SaaS applications in use today, 99% have no reliable backup and recovery available. In addition, 52% of the time, it was easy for an attacker to penetrate a SaaS application, typically doing so on the first try.

“Less than 10 of the SaaS vendors in the Gartner Magic quadrant are protected today,” he noted. While some, like Okta and ExtraHop, provide elements of protection, none are comprehensive.

“SaaS vendors are focused on delivering their own value,” Sundaram stated, indicating that they simply don’t have the resources to build this.

HYCU already has a presence in the SaaS application backup space. A year ago, they  added capabilities to their Protégé platform with HYCU Protégé for Microsoft Office 365.  The big Office Protection suites – Microsoft and Google – are more likely than any other SaaS app to be protected, but there are still significant limitations.

“Today the SaaS market is $219 billion, and Google and Microsoft combined are less than 5% of that,” Sundaram said. In addition, less than 50% of these two vendors are protected today.”

HYCU’s answer is R-Cloud, which lets SaaS companies and ISVs provide backup and recovery services for their SaaS offerings within an extremely short time frame.

“It’s a local platform, and is low code so developers can build SaaS modules quickly,” Sundaram said. They can integrate a module quickly, in as little as three days, whereas before it could have taken them years.”

Part of R-Cloud is R-Graph, a free flowchart tool of SaaS applications in the enterprise that is created through integration with Okta or Microsoft Azure Active Directory account connections.

“These partnerships let us take advantage of their data sources, to autodiscover all their SaaS services being used and the deployment status of each,” Sundaram stated. “We make it easier for the customer to get a fuller data picture. Being able to do this at scale is a brand new capability.”

Features of R-Cloud include one-click backup, for ‘set and forget’ backup policies that run 24/7, granular recovery across any SaaS application protected, self-service capabilities through role-based access control, and protection against ransomware.

“We also have built our marketplace, to integrate services they already have,” Sundaram added.

Out of the gate, the first SaaS-based applications, databases, and services supported in R-Cloud will include: Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Google Workspace, Google BigQuery, Salesforce, Atlassian Confluence, Jira Software and Atlassian Jira Service management, and Microsoft 365. New application integrations will be available through HYCU Protégé Marketplace.

“Our partners love this because it lets them demonstrate what is protected and what is not protected,” Sundaram said.

HYCU sees this as a core growth area of the business.

“We are early to the market in the sense that there is no other part of the market that protects what we do with this,” Sundaram said. “We expect this to become a significant part of our business and the overall business.”