Only a few years in the past, the cloud was touted because the “magic capsule” for any cyber menace or efficiency situation. Many had been lured by the “always-on” dream, buying and selling granular management for the comfort of managed providers.
In recent times, many people have realized (typically the laborious approach) that public cloud service suppliers are usually not resistant to assaults and SaaS downtime, hiding behind the Shared Duty cushion. To remain operational, aggressive, and resilient in right now’s menace panorama, groups should transfer past the dependency on SaaS suppliers and perceive what cyber resilience actually means.
The Delusion of DevOps SaaS Resilience
In 2024 alone, standard DevOps SaaS platforms—like GitHub, Jira, or Azure DevOps—skilled 502 incidents in whole, which resulted in degraded efficiency and outages totaling over 4,755 hours. The conclusion is obvious: Entrusting “the large gamers” together with your supply code, improvement metadata, and workflow initiatives would not make your enterprise resistant to downtime and subsequent monetary loss.
The Numbers Say It All
In response to the 2024 CISO’s Information to DevOps Threats report by GitProtect, main cloud DevOps providers suffered from 48 vital and main incidents. Evaluating this with the 2025 version of the report we have been engaged on by analyzing official suppliers’ and third-party communications (to be revealed quickly), we are able to see a 69% enhance year-over-year (YoY) with 156 vital and main incidents in whole!
The overall time of service efficiency degradation jumped from 4,755 hours in 2024 to over 9,255 hours in 2025. Whether or not it is whole downtime, login failures, or sluggish responsiveness, these disruptions have gotten a relentless menace to day by day operations.
For detailed overviews of essentially the most distinguished incidents, we encourage you to look contained in the report.
The Mannequin of Shared Duty
The Shared Duty mannequin is a standard settlement between your enterprise and a SaaS supplier, the place they’re answerable for their cloud infrastructure, however you are answerable for your knowledge inside it, together with supply code repositories, metadata, points, or the rest. Regardless that some suppliers would possibly provide assist in restoring knowledge, the character and scope of this assist are usually not all the time clear. In the end, you bear the ultimate duty.
Moreover, shared duty provisions may additionally apply to backups you make within the supplier’s cloud, utilizing native backup options. Some suppliers explicitly state that you could’t use such backups to revert sure kinds of adjustments (e.g., intentional deletion), leaving you uncovered.
The underside line: No DevOps SaaS supplier is contractually obligated to guard or restore your knowledge.
The Single Level of Failure
Counting on the native DevOps cloud backups and not using a multi‑layered knowledge safety technique is turning into more and more dangerous.
First, backing up your code throughout the similar infrastructure as your manufacturing creates a single level of failure. Everybody is aware of the proverb about not protecting all eggs in a single basket. If, for instance, Atlassian’s Jira is down, each your manufacturing and backup knowledge could be unavailable as nicely, except your SaaS supplier has carried out correctly remoted configurations.
Native DevOps cloud backups are a baseline expectation, however in isolation, they aren’t a panacea. Different issues you would possibly face embrace:
Restore limitations: As talked about earlier, native backups could be restricted to revive situations outlined exactly by your SaaS supplier. In consequence, you will not have the ability to get well knowledge or might want to negotiate with them to get actual help at finest.
Lack of flexibility: Native backup mechanisms normally do not provide any granularity of backup and restore. So, when you lose only a single department of your mission, you will have to get well all the things, losing time and sources.
Knowledge gaps: Given the dynamic nature of repositories with new pull/merge/push requests, or Jira with its work objects, there is a threat of native backup mechanisms creating knowledge gaps that’ll end up problematic throughout restore.
The conclusion? Native backup from SaaS suppliers is just not sufficient anymore, additional contributing to the parable of SaaS resilience.
What Are the Precise Issues for the Enterprise Clients of DevOps SaaS Suppliers?
Whereas excessive‑profile cyberattacks seize headlines, the on a regular basis actuality for SaaS cloud- dependent firms is that service outages inflict important monetary and operational harm. Analysis reveals that downtime is excess of a technical inconvenience—it erodes income, productiveness, and buyer belief, amongst different issues.
Rising Prices of Downtime and Affect on Monetary Liquidity
For cloud-first organizations, upstream SaaS supplier downtime can translate into a whole lot of hundreds and even hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in losses.
Info Know-how Intelligence Consulting survey discovered that the price of hourly downtime exceeds $300,000 for 90% of mid-size and enormous corporations.1 The scenario turns into vital for big enterprises. Fortune 1000 firms can face hourly downtime prices starting from $1 million to over $5 million.
Different sources unanimously cite excessive prices of downtime, too. For instance, within the Uptime Institute’s Annual outage evaluation 2024, over half of the respondents reported that their most up-to-date severe outage price greater than $100,000, whereas 16% cited the quantity of greater than $1 million.2
One factor is for sure: Downtime prices are already enormous and are rising yearly. Whereas they’re bearable (however nonetheless painful) for enterprises, they could significantly influence the funds of smaller software program distributors, and even trigger them to shut down utterly.
Engineering and Operational Paralysis
The failure of your SaaS cloud supplier can paralyze your analysis and improvement (R&D) and even the entire enterprise exercise. Particularly if you closely depend on the cloud, treating it like a type of ‘central nervous system’ orchestrating your operations. Being cloud-first could be handy, but when the cloud’s on fireplace, you are burning, too.
See the way it can have an effect on you from the technical perspective:
Supply management administration (SCM) freeze—your builders cannot push pull requests to distant git repositories, and managers or seniors cannot run checks, overview, or settle for them.
Workflow chaos—if a process administration SaaS like Jira fails, and your staff cannot entry initiatives and points, nobody is aware of what to do subsequent.
No entry to dependencies—if, for instance, GitHub Packages or Azure Artifacts do not work, the functionalities of your app that use dependencies will not work both.
Information supply loss—your staff cannot entry points and wikis to seek the advice of data, test details, or prioritize bugs.
Testing stops—with the testing orchestrator module like GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines down, check & validation phases are interrupted.
Others (authentication fails, no centralized communication, and so forth.)
As you’ll be able to see, the influence might be huge, disrupting your enterprise in some ways.
Affected Clients, Repute, and SLAs
This paralysis can result in failed or delayed initiatives, impacting your group’s prospects or companions. This eroded belief can, in flip, result in fame losses that translate into actual monetary prices.
And when you’re a software program vendor creating apps below demanding Service Degree Agreements (SLA), downtime can imply actual issues. It could halt a vital launch or a hotfix for a customer-facing error. Many SLAs require these fixes inside 4–8 hours. Failing to satisfy these “Decision Occasions” typically ends in contractual penalties, including to the overall price of the outage.
Safety Dangers
Underneath strain to satisfy deadlines throughout an outage, groups typically flip to Shadow IT—utilizing unsanctioned software program or workarounds with out IT oversight. This would possibly embrace sharing code snippets, confidential data, or credentials over Slack or private electronic mail.
Such practices are extremely undesirable for these causes:
potential code and know-how leaks,
potential mental property loss,
creating vulnerabilities in your code (as soon as third-party intercepts it),
creating vulnerabilities in your setting (if customers additionally share credentials).
The hidden menace? Your group might turn into compromised lengthy after the downtime really occurred. And it is simply one other price, is not it?
Compliance Points
Particularly if you belong to a regulated trade, you need to guarantee compliance in several areas of your enterprise operations, together with knowledge safety.
SaaS downtime (in addition to different disastrous occasions like unintended knowledge deletion) would possibly expose your inadequate measures, which, for your enterprise, would possibly imply audit failure, unsuccessful certification, and even further prices. Native backup would possibly end up inadequate to cowl every restoration situation.
Simply to remind you, the duty to backup your knowledge is outlined in lots of rules and trade requirements:
Article 21 of the NI2 Directive, space: Enterprise continuity, comparable to backup administration and catastrophe restoration, and disaster administration.
The A.8.13 (Info backup) management is outlined in Annex A to ISO 27001 customary.
The Belief Companies Standards (TSC), like Availability (A1.2), Safety (CC7.1,) below SOC2.
The best way to Create a Setup that Protects You towards Downtime
To enhance immunity to downtime incidents affecting your upstream SaaS supplier, you want a shift from being reactive to proactive. You want a plan B.
Resiliency Technique to Decrease Affect
True availability is just not about if techniques fail, it is about how shortly you’ll be able to get well and resume enterprise as standard. That is why an efficient resiliency technique for your enterprise ought to embrace:
Frequent and complete backups masking not simply supply code or points, but additionally configurations and metadata. The information ought to let you shortly recreate your setup domestically (e.g., utilizing a self-managed answer like Azure DevOps Server or Bitbucket Knowledge Heart) or with a aggressive cloud vendor, utilizing the cross-restore performance.
Immutable and remoted storage that does not depend on a single cloud vendor’s infrastructure. The most secure possibility is to make sure copy replication, following the favored 3-2-1 backup rule, the place you retain 3 separate copies in 2 completely different places, storing 1 copy offsite. It is also a good suggestion to arrange optimum knowledge retention that matches your mission lifecycle and wishes.
Built-in restore orchestration that understands dependencies throughout providers, APIs, and environments to have the ability to resume shortly, with out organizational chaos.
Steady testing of restoration flows to keep away from making your backup one other threat.
Clearly outlined backup KPIs like Restoration Time Goal (RTO) and Restoration Level Goal (RPO) to know the way a lot time you might want to resume after a catastrophe and the way typically to again up your SaaS knowledge to stop loss.
Additional Advantages for Your Group
A strong backup and restoration answer might be the pillar of your resiliency technique towards SaaS downtime. On the similar time, it could actually convey additional comfort and safety in your cloud-stored repositories or initiatives. This is what you will get as a bonus:
Migrating/merging SaaS environments—with a backup software, you’ll be able to migrate to a unique SaaS supplier or cloud area; it is also potential to consolidate repositories or Jira situations in case of restructuring, mergers, division strikes, and so forth.
Sandboxing—you should use a backup copy to shortly create a sandbox setting for testing new integrations, configuration adjustments, and so forth.
Retention and archiving for compliance—combining a backup software together with your storage, you’ll be able to go nicely past retention intervals of SaaS suppliers. It’s also possible to archive legacy repositories or Jira initiatives with out dropping entry to them. That approach, you’ll be able to nonetheless entry historic knowledge whereas saving area in SaaS.
Selective restores—you’ll be able to repair unintended or malicious deletion of a department or a number of Jira points immediately, saving time and remaining agile.
Storage sovereignty—you’ll be able to implement on-premises deployments the place your most treasured knowledge (know-how, mental property, prospects’ and companions’ private data) by no means leaves your infrastructure.
And lots of extra.
Belief the Skilled DevSecOps Consultants
DevOps SaaS platforms—similar to any IT setting—cannot provide you with 100% safety and uptime. The well-planned resiliency technique is a should if you wish to concentrate on innovation relatively than firefighting outages sooner or later.
The GitProtect Staff may also help you with that. Due to over 15 years’ expertise within the backup trade and our distinctive concentrate on SaaS and DevSecOps, we are able to collectively develop a technique that is essentially the most useful and optimized in your very wants. Go to GitProtect.io, meet the product, and speak to our consultants to debate your use case, personalize the setup, and effectively defend what’s most treasured.
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