Just a few years ago, the cloud was touted as the “magic pill” for any cyber threat or performance issue. Many were lured by the “always-on” dream, trading granular control for the convenience of managed services.
In recent years, many of us have learned (often the hard way) that public cloud service providers are not immune to attacks and SaaS downtime, hiding behind the Shared Responsibility cushion. To stay operational, competitive, and resilient in today’s threat landscape, teams must move beyond the dependency on SaaS providers and understand what cyber resilience really means.
The Myth of DevOps SaaS Resilience
In 2024 alone, popular DevOps SaaS platforms—like GitHub, Jira, or Azure DevOps—experienced 502 incidents in total, which resulted in degraded performance and outages totaling over 4,755 hours. The conclusion is clear: Entrusting “the big players” with your source code, development metadata, and workflow projects doesn’t make your business immune to downtime and subsequent financial loss.
The Numbers Say It All
According to the 2024 CISO’s Guide to DevOps Threats report by GitProtect, leading cloud DevOps services suffered from 48 critical and major incidents. Comparing this with the 2025 edition of the report we’ve been working on by analyzing official providers’ and third-party communications (to be published soon), we can see a 69% increase year-over-year (YoY) with 156 critical and major incidents in total!
The total time of service performance degradation jumped from 4,755 hours in 2024 to over 9,255 hours in 2025. Whether it’s total downtime, login failures, or sluggish responsiveness, these disruptions are becoming a relentless threat to daily operations.
For detailed overviews of the most prominent incidents, we encourage you to look inside the report.
The Model of Shared Responsibility
The Shared Responsibility model is a common agreement between your business and a SaaS provider, where they are responsible for their cloud infrastructure, but you’re responsible for your data within it, including source code repositories, metadata, issues, or anything else. Even though some providers might offer help in restoring data, the nature and scope of this help are not always clear. Ultimately, you bear the final responsibility.
Furthermore, shared responsibility provisions might also apply to backups you make in the provider’s cloud, using native backup features. Some providers explicitly state that you can’t use such backups to revert certain types of changes (e.g., intentional deletion), leaving you exposed.
The bottom line: No DevOps SaaS provider is contractually obligated to protect or restore your data.
The Single Point of Failure
Relying on the native DevOps cloud backups without a multi‑layered data protection strategy is becoming increasingly risky.
First, backing up your code within the same infrastructure as your production creates a single point of failure. Everyone knows the proverb about not keeping all eggs in one basket. If, for example, Atlassian’s Jira is down, both your production and backup data might be unavailable as well, unless your SaaS provider has implemented properly isolated configurations.
Native DevOps cloud backups are a baseline expectation, but in isolation, they are not a panacea. Other problems you might face include:
- Restore limitations: As mentioned earlier, native backups might be limited to restore scenarios defined precisely by your SaaS provider. As a result, you won’t be able to recover data or will need to negotiate with them to get real assistance at best.
- Lack of flexibility: Native backup mechanisms usually don’t offer any granularity of backup and restore. So, if you lose just a single branch of your project, you will need to recover everything, wasting time and resources.
- Data gaps: Given the dynamic nature of repositories with new pull/merge/push requests, or Jira with its work items, there’s a risk of native backup mechanisms creating data gaps that’ll turn out problematic during restore.
The conclusion? Native backup from SaaS providers is not enough anymore, further contributing to the myth of SaaS resilience.
What Are the Actual Problems for the Enterprise Customers of DevOps SaaS Providers?
While high‑profile cyberattacks grab headlines, the everyday reality for SaaS cloud- dependent companies is that service outages inflict significant financial and operational damage. Research shows that downtime is far more than a technical inconvenience—it erodes revenue, productivity, and customer trust, among other things.
Rising Costs of Downtime and Impact on Financial Liquidity
For cloud-first organizations, upstream SaaS provider downtime can translate into hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in losses.
Information Technology Intelligence Consulting survey found that the cost of hourly downtime exceeds $300,000 for 90% of mid-size and large firms.1 The situation becomes critical for large enterprises. Fortune 1000 companies can face hourly downtime costs ranging from $1 million to over $5 million.
Other sources unanimously cite high costs of downtime, too. For example, in the Uptime Institute’s Annual outage analysis 2024, over half of the respondents reported that their most recent serious outage cost more than $100,000, while 16% cited the amount of more than $1 million.2
One thing is for certain: Downtime costs are already huge and are rising every year. While they are bearable (but still painful) for enterprises, they might seriously impact the finances of smaller software vendors, or even cause them to close down completely.
Engineering and Operational Paralysis
The failure of your SaaS cloud provider can paralyze your research and development (R&D) or even the whole business activity. Especially when you heavily rely on the cloud, treating it like a kind of ‘central nervous system’ orchestrating your operations. Being cloud-first might be convenient, but if the cloud’s on fire, you’re burning, too.
See how it can affect you from the technical perspective:
- Source control management (SCM) freeze—your developers can’t push pull requests to remote git repositories, and managers or seniors can’t run checks, review, or accept them.
- Workflow chaos—if a task management SaaS like Jira fails, and your team can’t access projects and issues, no one knows what to do next.
- No access to dependencies—if, for example, GitHub Packages or Azure Artifacts don’t work, the functionalities of your app that use dependencies won’t work either.
- Knowledge source loss—your team can’t access issues and wikis to consult information, check facts, or prioritize bugs.
- Testing stops—with the testing orchestrator module like GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines down, test & validation stages are interrupted.
- Others (authentication fails, no centralized communication, etc.)
As you can see, the impact can be enormous, disrupting your business in many ways.
Affected Customers, Reputation, and SLAs
This paralysis can lead to failed or delayed projects, impacting your organization’s customers or partners. This eroded trust can, in turn, lead to reputation losses that translate into real financial costs.
And if you’re a software vendor creating apps under demanding Service Level Agreements (SLA), downtime can mean real problems. It can halt a critical release or a hotfix for a customer-facing error. Many SLAs require these fixes within 4–8 hours. Failing to meet these “Resolution Times” often results in contractual penalties, adding to the total cost of the outage.
Security Risks
Under pressure to meet deadlines during an outage, teams often turn to Shadow IT—using unsanctioned software or workarounds without IT oversight. This might include sharing code snippets, confidential information, or credentials over Slack or personal email.
Such practices are highly undesirable for these reasons:
- potential code and know-how leaks,
- potential intellectual property loss,
- creating vulnerabilities in your code (once third-party intercepts it),
- creating vulnerabilities in your environment (if users also share credentials).
The hidden threat? Your organization may become compromised long after the downtime actually happened. And it’s just another cost, isn’t it?
Compliance Issues
Especially when you belong to a regulated industry, you must ensure compliance in different areas of your business operations, including data protection.
SaaS downtime (as well as other disastrous events like accidental data deletion) might expose your insufficient measures, which, for your business, might mean audit failure, unsuccessful certification, or even additional costs. Native backup might turn out insufficient to cover each recovery scenario.
Just to remind you, the obligation to backup your data is defined in many regulations and industry standards:
- Article 21 of the NI2 Directive, area: Business continuity, such as backup management and disaster recovery, and crisis management.
- The A.8.13 (Information backup) control is defined in Annex A to ISO 27001 standard.
- The Trust Services Criteria (TSC), like Availability (A1.2), Security (CC7.1,) under SOC2.
How to Create a Setup that Protects You against Downtime
To improve immunity to downtime incidents affecting your upstream SaaS provider, you need a shift from being reactive to proactive. You need a plan B.
Resiliency Strategy to Minimize Impact
True availability is not about if systems fail, it’s about how quickly you can recover and resume business as usual. That’s why an effective resiliency strategy for your business should include:
- Frequent and comprehensive backups covering not just source code or issues, but also configurations and metadata. The data should allow you to quickly recreate your setup locally (e.g., using a self-managed solution like Azure DevOps Server or Bitbucket Data Center) or with a competitive cloud vendor, using the cross-restore functionality.
- Immutable and isolated storage that doesn’t rely on a single cloud vendor’s infrastructure. The safest option is to ensure copy replication, following the popular 3-2-1 backup rule, where you keep 3 separate copies in 2 different locations, storing 1 copy offsite. It’s also a good idea to set up optimal data retention that fits your project lifecycle and needs.
- Integrated restore orchestration that understands dependencies across services, APIs, and environments to be able to resume quickly, without organizational chaos.
- Continuous testing of recovery flows to avoid making your backup another risk.
- Clearly defined backup KPIs like Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to know how much time you need to resume after a disaster and how often to back up your SaaS data to prevent loss.
Extra Benefits for Your Organization
A robust backup and recovery solution can be the pillar of your resiliency strategy against SaaS downtime. At the same time, it can bring extra convenience and security for your cloud-stored repositories or projects. Here’s what you can get as a bonus:
- Migrating/merging SaaS environments—with a backup tool, you can migrate to a different SaaS provider or cloud region; it’s also possible to consolidate repositories or Jira instances in case of restructuring, mergers, department moves, etc.
- Sandboxing—you can use a backup copy to quickly create a sandbox environment for testing new integrations, configuration changes, etc.
- Retention and archiving for compliance—combining a backup tool with your storage, you can go well beyond retention periods of SaaS providers. You can also archive legacy repositories or Jira projects without losing access to them. That way, you can still access historical data while saving space in SaaS.
- Selective restores—you can fix accidental or malicious deletion of a branch or several Jira issues in an instant, saving time and remaining agile.
- Storage sovereignty—you can implement on-premises deployments where your most precious data (know-how, intellectual property, customers’ and partners’ personal information) never leaves your infrastructure.
- And many more.
Trust the Experienced DevSecOps Experts
DevOps SaaS platforms—just like any IT environment—can’t give you 100% security and uptime. The well-planned resiliency strategy is a must if you want to focus on innovation rather than firefighting outages in the future.
The GitProtect Team can help you with that. Thanks to over 15 years’ experience in the backup industry and our unique focus on SaaS and DevSecOps, we can together develop a strategy that’s the most beneficial and optimized for your very needs. Visit GitProtect.io, meet the product, and contact our experts to discuss your use case, personalize the setup, and efficiently protect what’s most precious.
