Secure Your Data, Empower Your Business

Data is more than just information—it’s the lifeblood of your business. Effective data governance ensures that your data is secure, accessible, and used responsibly. While many organisations turn to SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions for convenience, there are significant advantages to maintaining control over your data by not relying on SaaS-based platforms.

Safeguarding your organisation’s data is more critical than ever, making effective data governance an essential practice. By maintaining control over your data, ensuring it is securely hosted in compliant locations, and having robust recovery plans in place, you can protect your business from potential disruptions. Prioritising data privacy and carefully managing how information is shared ensures that sensitive data remains secure, fostering trust with your customers and partners. A well-rounded data governance strategy not only mitigates risks but also empowers your business to thrive in a data-driven world.

• Ownership of data
• Hosting and location control
• Recovery and business continuity
• Data sharing and privacy

When you manage your own data, you retain full ownership and control over it. SaaS providers often include clauses in their terms of service that grant them certain rights to your data, whether for analysis, marketing, or other purposes. By avoiding SaaS-based solutions, you eliminate the risk of your data being used or shared without your explicit consent. Full data ownership means you dictate how and where your data is stored, who has access to it, and how it is used.

With your data hosted on-premises or in a private cloud, you have complete control over its location. This is critical for compliance with local data protection regulations, which may require that data is stored within specific geographical boundaries. Relying on SaaS can introduce uncertainty, as your data could be hosted in multiple locations, potentially outside of your preferred jurisdiction. By self-hosting or using non-SaaS solutions, you maintain clear oversight of your data’s physical and virtual locations.

One of the most significant risks associated with SaaS platforms is the potential for business disruption if the provider goes out of business, suffers a data breach, or experiences a prolonged outage. When you manage your own data infrastructure, you control the backup and recovery processes. This independence ensures that you can quickly restore operations in the event of a disaster, without relying on a third-party provider whose future is beyond your control.

SaaS platforms often share data between different customers to improve their services, sometimes using aggregated or anonymized data for analytics or product development. However, this practice introduces the risk of inadvertently sharing competitive insights or sensitive information. By keeping your data within your own infrastructure, you eliminate the possibility of your data being shared with or accessed by other users of the same platform. This ensures that your proprietary information remains confidential and is not leveraged by competitors.

By opting out of vendor locked and SaaS-based technologies, you enhance your data governance practices, ensuring that your data remains secure, compliant, and fully under your control. While SaaS offers convenience, the long-term benefits of owning, hosting, and managing your own data infrastructure far outweigh the risks, especially when it comes to privacy, security, and business continuity.