Picture this: It’s San Francisco, 1999. A group of tech founders is hard at work in an apartment building, providing cloud-based solutions to a small, progressive customer base. The company? None other than Salesforce. Fast-forward to 2024: The publicly traded, global enterprise is celebrating its 25th anniversary, sharing a throwback video of its humble beginnings with its over 150,000 customers.
While an anomaly at first, Salesforce (and other platforms like it) have become commonplace tools used by organizations of all sizes. This is a credit to the ease of deployment, business agility, and scalability that these applications provide. In the early days, those who adopted SaaS applications reaped these benefits uniquely, creating a competitive advantage for themselves. Now, it’s the data you put into these platforms that helps you gain an edge.
The Differentiating Value of Data
With the widespread adoption of SaaS applications, the playing field has leveled, and businesses must look beyond the tools themselves to stand out. Today, the real differentiation lies not in the usage of SaaS applications, but in the data that organizations are capturing within them.
Data has emerged as the currency of the digital age, offering organizations invaluable insights into customer behavior, market trends, and operational efficiency. With SaaS applications in particular, the data that resides within platforms like Salesforce holds the most potential for driving growth and innovation. Whether it's understanding customer preferences, identifying emerging opportunities, or optimizing internal processes, the data within your SaaS applications is a differentiating asset - one to be protected and used to its fullest.
Protecting Your Data is Your Responsibility
With data playing a pivotal role in today's business landscape, protecting it has never been more critical. And with the data in SaaS applications, that responsibility falls on you. Every SaaS vendor protects only their platform; they place the responsibility to protect your data on you. This is true not just for Salesforce but also for ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics, and every other SaaS application.
The burden of shared responsibility goes beyond ensuring business continuity when data is lost or corrupted—it also extends to securing it against unauthorized access and ensuring compliance with regulations and governance policies. This responsibility to protect your data is challenging because risks to data are widespread. 32% of Salesforce companies report accidental loss of large volumes of data at least monthly.
Failing to protect data against these risks has financial consequences, whether looking at lost productivity or revenue from downtime, the costs in the aftermath of a data breach caused by security failures, or the costs of failing to comply with any growing regulations.
Activating Your Data is Your Opportunity
Protecting data is critical, but it's only the beginning. When something is valuable, when something is a source of competitive advantage, you have to protect it, but you should also leverage it fully.
SaaS vendors don't make it easy for you to work with data. They make it expensive to store and painful to move by limiting API usage or requiring manual effort to use data in sandboxes effectively. These limitations can stifle innovation. For example, many Salesforce don't refresh their sandboxes more frequently because of the time and effort required. So, they lose out on the ability to have fresh, accurate data for testing. Data that could help identify bugs before they get to production or that could help reduce the hours they spend on fixing code and redirect that time towards building and innovating.
Yet even with all of those challenges in working with SaaS data, the potential payoff from activating your data has never been higher. With AI's potential to significantly improve business outcomes, there's fresh demand for that data, and specifically historical data. Historical data is the fuel for many of the AI and predictive models that have burst onto the scene, and many of the most promising use cases are customer-facing.
Empower Your Business with Own
SaaS itself may not be a differentiator anymore, but the data it generates undoubtedly is. And just like the earliest adopters of Salesforce gained a first-mover advantage, those who act quickly to maximize their data's potential will have the most to gain.
That’s where Own can help. We empower you to protect and activate the value of your data at every step of your SaaS journey. We give you the broadest data protection for Salesforce, the tools to help you activate that data to fuel innovation, and the ability to extend your data strategy beyond Salesforce to all your mission-critical SaaS data.
Learn more about the Own Data Platform here or request a demo below.
