The HYCU R-Cloud platform was launched to enable enterprise-grade backup and recovery for the critical business data stored in customers’ SaaS applications. Increasingly, the platform is expanding its reach to protect a different, but equally important, type of data: the security policies and user IDs stored in Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems.
The latest IAM platform R-Cloud is protecting: the widely used Microsoft Entra ID, formerly known as Azure Active Directory. Suppport for this platform brings to over 80 the number of applications and platforms R-Cloud now protects, with a mix of integrations built by HYCU itself as well as third parties using the R-Cloud Development environment.
The Entra ID integration is important because of the value of the data stored in Entra, the labor that goes into creating and maintaining it, and the lack of any existing protections. Plus, Entra ID has a massive footprint: 610 million monthly active users as of 2023, including approximately 400 million from Microsoft tenants and 210 million from non-Microsoft workloads.
In data gathered from more than 1,000 customers, HYCU found that, on average, C-suite tech leaders say it would take three months to rebuild all that data if it was deleted or otherwise compromised. That’s a massive hit to business continuity that no businesses can absorb.
In HYCU’s recent State of SaaS Resilience report, more than 400 IT decision makers responded that they would be meaningfully impacted if their Microsoft Entra ID, SSO, and IAM data became unavailable due to cyberattack or error, and those two factors are significant threats. IAM policies and configurations are subject to frequent changes and human error, making them a compelling target for ransomware attacks and cybercriminals looking to wreak havoc.
“There is an enormous amount of systemic risk,” says HYCU founder and CEO Simon Taylor. “This truly is the keys to your kingdom.”
He adds, “If anything should ever happen to all the configurations and policies you’ve set up with identity management, we want to make sure you can restore those with the touch of a button.”
Through API connections between the systems, R-Cloud is able to visualize what’s happening in the Entra ID environment to facilitate backup and restoration of data. Taylor emphasized that the company’s approach is one of “bring your own storage” meaning the goal isn’t access to the Entra ID customers’ configuration data; HYCU recommends that customers maintain this data in immutable storage.
For Entra ID customers, R-Cloud will now provide:
- One-click restoration of configurations and data, from individual items to the entire Entra ID dataset
- Backups that operate on autopilot, at user-selectable intervals
- Unified protection and recovery across not only Entra ID but additional prominent IAM platforms including Okta’s Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Cloud, as well as AWS IAM
With the dozens of integrations it now offers, customers are finding the platform is an effective means to protect data across their software ecosystem. “People are really starting use us as a Swiss Army Knife,” Taylor says.
While CISOs and CIOs both are typical stakeholders in the use of R-Cloud, CIOs remain the primary decision makers in choosing the software, Taylor says.
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