Why SaaS Backup and SSPM Are Merging Into Single Platforms

We’ve been watching backup vendors absorb SSPM capabilities for the past few years.

What first looked like feature creep is actually a structural response to a problem the market couldn’t ignore: organizations have backup tools and SSPM tools, but they still can’t recover when ransomware hits their SaaS environment.

The convergence is based in the technical reality that backup and posture management share the same attack surface, and separating them creates blind spots that attackers exploit systematically.

The Gap That Fragmentation Creates

Here’s the scenario that keeps repeating: an organization runs separate backup and SSPM tools. The SSPM flags a risky OAuth app with broad scopes. The backup platform reports “jobs successful, RPO met.” Both tools are working as designed.

Then ransomware detonates.

The OAuth app the SSPM flagged weeks ago had access to modify native data protection policies. The attacker used it to disable jobs, age out restore points, and turn off alerts. By the time the organization needs to recover, their last clean copy is gone.

No single tool saw the full path: OAuth app → identity with data protection admin rights → ability to neutralize recovery.

That’s not a configuration problem. That’s an architecture problem.

Ransomware attacks rose 126% in Q1 2025, and attackers now systematically target backup infrastructure. When backup systems are compromised in 7.5% of cases, the separation between “who can access our SaaS data” and “who can touch our backups” becomes a fatal design flaw.

Why the Graph Has to Live Inside Backup

The technical forcing function is simple: backup platforms need to answer a question that external SSPM tools can’t.

“Can this identity or app wipe my last good copy?”

Answering that requires a graph that connects SaaS identities, OAuth apps, permissions, backup jobs, repositories, and immutability policies. You need to trace from a token all the way to restore points, in real time, and block destructive actions before they execute.

External SSPM tools see misconfigurations and risky apps. Backup platforms see job status and repository health. Neither sees the blast radius when those two worlds intersect.

That’s why vendors are building the graph internally. The latency and semantic gap of waiting for an external feed is too slow for real-time protection.

When a new OAuth app gets authorized with `Sites.FullControl.All` and `BackupPolicy.Manage`, a unified platform can immediately evaluate: does this create a path to our immutable copies? If yes, block or require step-up verification. If the tools are separate, that correlation never happens.

What Unified Platforms Actually Do Differently

The architecture isn’t complicated. It’s just integrated.

Normalized identity model: Users, OAuth apps, service principals, and tokens collapse into one view. The platform knows which actors can touch SaaS data and which can modify backup infrastructure.

Backup-aware graph: Nodes for identities, apps, SaaS resources, backup jobs, repositories, and immutability settings. Edges for access, control, and protection relationships. The graph answers “who can reach what” across both production and recovery.

Streaming change pipeline: SaaS events (new OAuth consents, role changes, config updates) and backup events (policy edits, job modifications) update the graph in real time. Risk evaluation happens as actions are attempted, not hours later in a report.

Policy engine in the control path: Destructive backup actions—delete restore points, shorten retention, disable immutability go through a decision point that queries the graph. If the actor behind the API call has a toxic combination of SaaS access and backup control, the platform blocks it.

This isn’t theoretical. Companies use an average of 106 SaaS applications, and SSPM adoption jumped from 17% in 2022 to 44% in 2023. Organizations are consolidating because managing separate tools for each security function is operationally unsustainable.

The Board-Level Language Shift

The convergence accelerated when executives started asking different questions.

Three years ago, boards asked: “Do we have backups?”

Now they ask: “How long to safe recovery, and what’s the blast radius if backup credentials are compromised?”

That language shift happened because only 22% of organizations recovered within 24 hours after ransomware, despite most having backup tools. The gap between “we have the tools” and “we can actually recover” became a board-level liability.

When CISOs walk through recent failures, the gaps almost always live in the seams between backup, SaaS configuration, and identity tools. Fragmented stacks correlate with poor recovery outcomes.

Unified platforms answer the board’s questions directly. Time to safe recovery becomes measurable. Blast radius becomes calculable. Recovery stops being a hope and becomes an engineered outcome.

The Migration Path From Fragmented to Unified

For security teams running separate backup and SSPM tools today, the transition isn’t about ripping everything out. It’s about collapsing the seam where attacks succeed.

Start by mapping the overlap. Which identities have both SaaS admin rights and backup policy access? Which OAuth apps can reach both production data and backup APIs? That’s your blast radius.

Then evaluate whether your current tools can answer: “If this identity is compromised, can we still recover?” If the answer requires manual correlation across dashboards, you’re in the gap.

Unified platforms eliminate that manual work. They maintain the graph, compute blast radius automatically, and enforce policies that prevent toxic combinations of access. The value isn’t just consolidation. It’s that recovery becomes a repeatable workflow instead of an emergency scramble.

The market data supports this. The SaaS backup market reached $4.9 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $20.1 billion by 2033, growing at 17.2% annually. That growth isn’t just more backup. It’s backup platforms absorbing security posture, data protection, and ransomware response into unified architectures.

Why This Convergence Is Inevitable

The forcing function is simple: attackers already treat backup and SaaS posture as one attack surface. Defenders can’t afford to keep them separate.

When 23% of cloud security incidents result from misconfiguration, and organizations using SSPM resolve misconfigurations 73% faster than manual methods, the operational case for unified platforms is clear.

But the technical case is even stronger. OAuth apps persist after employees leave. Misconfigurations accumulate faster than manual audits can catch them. Backup infrastructure shares the same identity and access control plane as production SaaS.

Separating backup and SSPM made sense when SaaS was simpler and attacks were less sophisticated. That world is gone.

The new reality is that backup platforms need real-time posture awareness to protect recovery paths, and SSPM tools need backup semantics to understand what actually matters. The only architecture that works is one where both capabilities share a graph and a policy engine.

Organizations that consolidate aren’t just reducing vendor count. They’re eliminating the blind spot where most SaaS ransomware attacks succeed: the seam between “we can see the risk” and “we can still recover.”

That’s not a nice-to-have optimization. That’s the difference between recovering in hours and being down for weeks.

Sources and References

1. Industrial Cyber. “Agenda Ransomware Abusing Remote Access Backup Tools to Escalate Attacks on Critical Infrastructure in 2025.”
2. Hostinger. “SaaS Statistics.”
3. Cloudwards. “SaaS Statistics.”
4. The Hacker News. “Insights from 2025 SaaS Backup and Recovery Report.”
5. Growth Market Reports. “SaaS Backup and Restore Market.”
6. RIB Software. “SaaS Trends.”
7. Grip Security. “Fix SaaS Misconfigurations.”

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