OwnBackup, a platform that provides data backup and recovery services for cloud software providers such as Salesforce, has raised $240 million in a series E round of funding at a $3.35 billion valuation.

With cloud spending continuing to surge as part of companies’ digital transformation efforts, this creates the need to develop a robust data backup and recovery plan — putting 100% faith in third-party infrastructure is never a good idea, particularly in light of the OVH datacenter disaster earlier this year. Elsewhere, a recent cloud threat report published by Oracle and KPMG found that three-quarters of organizations had experienced data loss from a cloud service on more than one occasion.

At the application level, SaaS platforms such as Salesforce usually offer disaster recovery tools as part of their service should a system-wide catastrophe occur — however, this generally doesn’t work at an individual account level, meaning that customers can’t recover or restore individual data items specific to them on-demand. This falls under what is known as a “shared responsibility” model, where the platform owner (e.g. Salesforce) is responsible for infrastructure-level security and disaster recovery, while the paying customer is responsible for managing things like permissions, passwords, and generally safeguarding all their data at the account level.

Own your backups

While it might be technically possible for SaaS customers to develop their own data backup and recovery tooling, specialized third-party platforms such as OwnBackup makes it much easier, allowing enterprises to allocate their IT resources to other initiatives.

“SaaS applications were not created with restoring lost or corrupted data in mind and there is no easy or effective way for customers to back up the data themselves,” OwnBackup CEO Sam Gutmann told VentureBeat. “Yet, data loss and corruption occur frequently.”

Moreover, even where SaaS providers do provide backup functionality, that doesn’t really address the problem of how to get the data back into the system.

“Those who rely on a SaaS provider’s backup capabilities or try to backup data themselves quickly discover the true challenge isn’t backing up the data, it’s restoring it,” Gutmann continued. “Isolating what damage was done is very difficult, and restoring just the impacted data to a specific point in time is practically impossible.”

OwnBackup serves businesses such as Adecco, AECOM, Aston Martin, Delivery Hero, and Navy Federal Credit Union with the tools to create daily backups and speedy data restore tools for all their SaaS data.

Prior to now, OwnBackup had raised around $267 million since its inception in 2015, including a $167.5 million round just seven months ago. While OwnBackup has pretty much put most of its focus on providing data backup and recovery services for Salesforce, and by extension Salesforce ecosystem companies such as Veeva and Ncino, with another $240 million in the bank the company is well positioned to extend support to other clouds, starting with Microsoft. Initially it will help Dynamics 365 customers meet “complex regulatory requirements” and “eliminate data disruptions” due to user and integration errors.

Ultimately, it’s all about giving companies total ownership of their data backups, and allow them to easily restore their systems.

Other notable companies in this space include Druva, which recently raised $147 million at a $2 billion valuation, and backup-as-a-service platform Rewind, which raised $15 million earlier this year and expanded its backup and recovery support to GitHub and Trello.