Best Ways to Protect Critical Data from SaaS Security Gaps

Accounting and tax professionals are relying on Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud tools more than ever as remote work becomes commonplace. But what does this accelerated shift to cloud accounting mean for your clients?

While all accounting and tax professionals know that clients’ files are absolutely sacred, what many don’t know is that they are responsible for keeping cloud data safe – just like a file of hardcopy receipts or a laptop with banking details. Lost or unrecoverable data, in any form, can be detrimental in the financial world. And as more business users rely on cloud applications for critical functions each year, the SaaS security gaps for accounting professionals will become more troublesome.

What Could Go Wrong?

Many things within the cloud can cause massive data mishaps. If you are testing a new app and it corrupts client data, you have no recourse to get the file back to the way it was before. If you offboard an employee or client and they delete critical data out of a group of client files, you are on the hook to restore all of your client’s data. Any of these events can cost you your practice.

However, your clients themselves could even be their own worst cloud data nightmare. If they have access to their own file and accidentally create a mess, the only way to fix it would be through a time-intensive manual recovery. As more and more clients move to the cloud, you need to be sure that you can offer them the highest level of assurance that their accounting data, supporting documents, and even working papers will be protected, backed up, and accessible at all times.

Why Does It Matter?

Manual errors, targeted cyberthreats, ransomware attacks, faulty data uploads and bad app integrations can all lead to lost data, lost time, lost credibility and potentially lost clients. Unfortunately, most users relying on SaaS tools and other cloud services mistakenly assume that data in the cloud is safe because it is “backed up by the provider!” While it’s true that respected platform services are backed up, and technically speaking, all the data on the platform is too, the reality is that the platforms don’t provide failsafe protection for your clients’ data.

There are major gaps. For instance, just because raw data is stored in the cloud of a trusted tech player (be it Google, Microsoft or Intuit QuickBooks) does not mean a quality copy (or backup) of that data is accessible … and it most certainly does not mean it would be usable. Reputable cloud-based accounting platforms like QuickBooks invest a tremendous amount of time fixing any potential security issues, but that system-level backup is only intended to be used for a widespread issue like a server crashing and taking down thousands of accounts. They back up customer data in bulk – meaning thousands, or even millions, of accounts are backed up as one enormous data dump.

Even if you could access your individual account data from that backup, there’s simply no way for you to easily use it to restore your clients’ account data to a certain point in time. It’d be like digging for a broken needle in a field overflowing with haystacks – you might miraculously find it, but it’d be useless.

How Can You Help Your Clients?

You need to protect the client data that keeps your business running. Your clients expect you to have thought through all of the implications of uploading their business data in the cloud and to protect them accordingly. Closing SaaS security gaps is all about taking control of your cloud app data.

If you are serious about avoiding SaaS security gaps, now is the time to improve how you protect your client files and hold your clients’ financial data to a higher standard. The easiest way is through a backup solution that offers automatic, continuous data protection and on-demand recovery. This will ensure that you have immediate access to your clients’ data in the event of a site or account failure, or even if you simply want to move/duplicate a particular accounting file.

With a full, real-time backup, you can even selectively restore certain pieces of data (e.g., just the AP transactions, or the bank information, or the sales for a given day). This level of data protection provides your clients’ data a deeper level of security while simultaneously giving your firm the flexibility needed to handle sensitive data – helping you stay ahead of the curve and stand out as a trusted advisor.

No matter the size of your practice, data protection and recovery services are important value-adds when handling your clients’ sensitive data assets. Strong data management practices can make or break a practice, so embedding backup software into your tech stack can become a competitive advantage for your business while also giving your team and your clients peace of mind.

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Mike Potter is the co-founder and CEO of Rewind, a cloud data protection provider trusted by over 80,000 businesses to protect their data on platforms such as BigCommerce, Shopify and QuickBooks. A veteran entrepreneur, Mike has over 25 years of experience building solutions for the software, cloud and data analytics space, including tenures at Adobe and Mozilla. He earned his MBA from the University of Ottawa and his B.Eng in Mechanical Engineering from McMaster University. Mike currently resides in Ottawa, Canada.