3 Recommendations when using Cloud Applications

Are you part of an IT department that has been told to manage the online accounts of cloud applications? Here’s a few recommendations that we’ve been giving to our customers in this boat.

I met with a customer this morning who runs the IT department at a large retail company (you would know who they are). He was recently told to start managing all the IT for the marketing and sales departments in his company which had, until now, been off doing their own thing. One of the things he discovered was that they use a product called Basecamp from 37Signals extensively. The different groups within his company have over 10 separate paid accounts, and they are storing GB’s of files and data in their accounts and sharing that data with partners and customers. The manager came to us for a solution to back up all of this data in one place but asked me if I had any other thoughts of things that needed to be done since I had quite a bit of experience with Basecamp. My thoughts immediately went to the more general concerns that businesses have in adopting cloud based applications and so I think that these thoughts are applicable to all applications.

There are typically 3 main concerns when a business looks into adopting a hosted application (aka Cloud or SaaS): 1) Security; 2) data ownership; and 3) vendor lock in. We have some recommendations for each of these.

Cloud Security

When an IT shop thinks about security there are lots of things to address. One thing that businesses have been working on for a long time is centralized access control so that there is on place to revoke an employee’s access. With cloud applications that has all been thrown back out the window. Now if an employee leaves or is fired their access needs to be revoked in numerous places. We recommend to our customers that they (as the IT department) need to have a master account in Basecamp that has access to all of their Basecamp accounts as an administrator. This way they at least have the ability to go in and revoke access to individuals as well as partner companies if needed. This is possible now that 37Signals rolled out the 37Signals ID which allows one user to have access to multiple accounts. Having administrator access in each of these accounts is key for an IT department as it allows them to control access as well as have a complete picture of what is happening within the Basecamp account.

Recommendation: You must have an administrator level account in all online applications your company uses.

Data Ownership

This is a pretty hot topic lately. Businesses want to be sure that they maintain control of their data that is stored in online applications. Sometimes this is out of fear of a catastrophe, other times it is peace of mind, sometimes it is the need to have a local copy of data, but it is always just good practice. If a company has an in house application running on an Oracle database, they are for sure backing up that database to ensure that their data is safe. The same applies to online applications, although the company running the application is probably doing their own backups, your business needs to know that that critical business data will always be available no matter what and in a timely manner. Many of these online application offer solutions to backup all or most of your data, and there are starting to be some 3rd party tools available to automate these types of tasks. However you do it, it is imperative that you are backing up this data. For Basecamp this means that you need to be backing up your data, files and Writeboards on a consistent basis.

Recommendation: Create a scheduled backup of your data stored in online applications that delivers your data to you so you have a local copy of it.

Vendor Lock In

A final area of concern is vendor lock in. This is nothing new, we had the same problem with in house systems, but many of the more mature tools offered migration utilities between their top competitors and there were a number of 3rd party tools that did this as well. As we look at online applications like Basecamp we seem to be back to square one. So many of these online applications are so new that there is little in the way of standardization, and API’s are lacking in many areas so writing your own migration tool is often next to impossible. We’re starting to see a few competitors to Basecamp offer partial migration tools to their offering, but the mappings are not complete. They don’t import files for example. There isn’t a lot that you can do to limit vendor lock in, but having complete exports of your data is a start. This removes one portion of the hurdle. For Basecamp you’ll want to do scheduled exports of your data. If you do find that you need to move on to another tool, whether hosted or in house, make sure that the new tool will map your projects and the data that you use often to a like mechanism within the tool so that you don’t lose so much of what you have been building up in these applications.

Recommendation: Ensure you have full exports of all data on hand and evaluate new products for potential gaps in data mapping.

 

I’d be interested in hearing what other recommendations people have…

What customers are doing with their Basecamp Backups – Part 2

This is a continuation of the posts on what customers are using our product for. Many of them are using them beyond the original idea that we had for the product which has been really interesting to us. We’ve been working hard to make things work better for these alternate uses in order to make them be main stream uses. The usage scenario I’ll talk about here is that of a user who is migrating away from Basecamp to another tool. For whatever reason, this is actually pretty common. Some people are unhappy with Basecamp, some have outgrown it and are in need of a project management tool that has more process associated with it, and some others have been mandated to use another tool by their corporate structures. Many of these customers have come to us to export all of their data, files and Writeboards from Basecamp so that they can migrate them to other tools. These customers are looking for a one time snapshot of their Basecamp accounts before they close the account.

We knew that some people would want to do this, but it didn’t really hit us that we needed to support it immediately until we were chatting with a customer about why he was cancelling our service, this customer told us, “the real problem I was trying to solve was archiving the Writeboards because we are moving off of Basecamp”. We did actually support, in a round about way. Essentially customers could sign up and use our product to get their snapshot and then cancel their account as this customer was doing. But they were all telling us that our service was such a time saver to them that they wanted to pay us for it. Another customer told us “it (Centripetal Retrieve) was the only solution I could find for backing up files and Writeboards in Basecamp. I was setup and scheduled for backup in five minutes. Once I confirmed a successful backup, I was no longer worried about losing my content because I'm finally guaranteed a local copy. It is a simple product that does what it says well and I appreciate that. I just need a way to pay you for it now!” The payment for a one time export is the part we didn’t support! We’ve now fixed this by providing 2 separate one time export plans that allow a customer to get a complete snapshot of all their data, files and Writeboards delivered to their Dropbox of FTP accounts and be done with it.

We now also provide a free trial plan that will give you a test trial to make sure that our product will do what you are looking for. This plan will backup all the data, files and Writeboards from one Basecamp project and deliver it to your Dropbox or FTP. We’re also in the testing phase of a DVD service that will allow you to get that export delivered to you on DVD. We’re super excited about that one!

Updated Plans, Pricing & Trial

We’ve been working on changing around the way our plans and pricing works for backup jobs of your Basecamp data, files an Writeboards. We released that tonight and we think that it will work even better for many of our customers. What we have been seeing is that about 15% of our customers were looking to do one time exports of their data. For some of them they are leaving Basecamp and just want to take their data with them. Others use Basecamp somewhat sporadically and just want to back it up when they feel that they need it. What these customers told us was essentially that they love our service, but only needed to use it on a limited basis, not the monthly recurring basis we were currently offering and they genuinely felt bad for signing up for a one time export only to cancel before paying anything. Thanks to those that were open about this and were willing to pay for our service because of the value that it provided to them.

We knew before we released that there was a group of people that would want the one time export functionality, but we chose to roll out our initial release with only the recurring plans in order to get the product into the wild as quickly as possible. As of tonight, we have now updated our plans to allow for more flexibility in what our customers are looking for. We’ve now broken our plans into two groups:

1. Recurring Backup Plans
2. One Time Export Plans

Recurring Backup Plans

Recurring Backup Plans are the same plans that we had previously, we clarified a few things in the plans like the number of Writeboards backed up for each plan. We’ve also removed the 30 day free trial that was associated with all plans, this was just giving away too much. We created a new Trial plan that allows users to try out our service on a limited functionality basis. The free trial allows a user to select a single (1) Basecamp project to backup files and Writeboards from and will run the backup one time and store the files and Writeboards to the user’s Dropbox or FTP account. The regular recurring plans still offer ongoing backups of data, files and Writeboards on plans ranging from $15/month to $75/month depending on the amount of files and Writeboards to be retrieved and the frequency of the backups.

We also still offer the Always Free Plan which backs up Basecamp data (but no files or Writeboards) on an ongoing, scheduled basis so that you don’t need to remember to go in and do a Basecamp export manually.

 

One Time Export Plans

The new plans we have added are the One Time Export Plans. These plans give a user the ability to do a one time, full export of all of their Basecamp data, files and Writeboards and have it stored to their Dropbox or FTP account. These plans run as soon as the setup is complete (and our scheduler can fit them in for processing time) and then do not run again unless the user wants to go in and run it again. We currently offer two (2) plans for the One Time Export service, the Medium Export plan ($30) for up to 15GB of files and 500 Writeboards, as well the Jumbo Export plan ($60) for up to 75GB of files and unlimited Writeboards.

We believe that these new sets of plans will meet the needs of our customers. We’ve been getting lots of other great feedback and are working hard on additional features that we’ll be rolling out soon.

Weekly Release

Things keep moving around here. We’ve been busy working on some pretty cool new features and we released one of them today.

Dropbox File Versioning

The new feature takes full advantage of Dropbox functionality and thus we’re going to start pushing Dropbox as our preferred storage solution for your Basecamp backups. Dropbox has a sophisticated versioning system for file versioning that we were not utilizing. With this release all files stored to Dropbox will begin to use the versioning capability within Dropbox. This means that if you update a file within Basecamp, you’ll begin to see version history information on your files just like you see in this screenshot:

From within Dropbox you will be able to see the history of all file changes that happen to that file from your Basecamp account. The version history will be updated every time and incremental backup runs and the file has been updated or modified in Basecamp or when a Full backup runs.

Besides the real benefit of having a true versioning system backing your files this feature also saves you space on your Dropbox account. Dropbox only counts space for the most recent version of a file, but you have the ability to access any of the versions of a file at anytime. Centripetal Retrieve no longer creates a separate date stamped folder for every full and incremental backup, which would create duplicate files and use up more of your space.

FTP Performance Optimizations

We had been noticing that storing customers data to their FTP servers was an order of magnitude slower than storing data to Dropbox. This is partly due to the high availability and fat pipe that Dropbox and Amazon S3 have making it really fast to ship files there, but there was also some optimization that we were able to do within our own code. We added in some cacheing at certain points of our FTP storage code and have greatly improved our storage times for those jobs.

As usual, stay tuned for lots more goodness coming soon. As the number of subscribers to our product increases, so does the amount of feedback we receive and that is helping us to prioritize our todo list as well as to find new features that people are wanting.

Article: Archiving from the Cloud

A recent article over at ITBusinessEdge titled "Archiving to the Cloud" is worth a read. It brings a trend to light about the growing use of online storage for backups and archivals of data for businesses. This has been a trend now for a while that I've been seeing as more and more people become comfortable with cloud based computing they are starting to see the real benefits of it in different ways. Especially for archiving and backups. The writer notes, "It is important to understand the type of data that is being stored in the cloud. Almost all industry experts believe that cloud storage is an ideal medium for maintaining online, long-term, unstructured content. This sentiment has been echoed by the end user and early cloud adopters." This type of data that people are storing in the cloud is just the type of data that many tools are starting to pop up to support. You may have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of providers of these services. I've been working on a review of them, it started out as "10 Online Backup Solutions" but has since grown to 25+, and that is just the good ones.

One other trend that I've been noticing just starting to creep in recently takes this one step further. As people are moving more and more of their business computing to cloud based apps like Salesforce, Basecamp, whatever else, they are raising the concern about data ownership and are asking for backup solutions of their data that is stored in these applications so that they can maintain control of their critical business data. They want to have access to their own data at anytime just like they would with a typical backup, even if that data is stored in a managed, hosted application. You could call this trend "Archiving From the Cloud"

At Centripetal Software, we've recently released a product that is our first crack at addressing this space. Our product can backup all of your data, files and writeboards from 37Signals Basecamp and deliver it to you via Dropbox (for online archiving and versioning) or FTP if you want it to come directly to your own server.

Read the full article at ITBusinessEdge

New Community Manager Joins our Team

I want to welcome a new member to the Centripetal Software team. Kjaere Friestad (KJ) will be joining us as a part time Community manager. She’ll be responsible for many of our community building activities as well as a warm, smiling face to our customers. KJ recently moved to San Francisco, CA after spending almost 9 years in the Santa Barbara area. She’ll be our Silicon Valley representative. She has a certificate in journalism and a love of many different media platforms. She is an expert and avid user of various social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, etc. Her current full time job is as an assistant Preschool teacher at a private school off Haight street in San Francisco. Prior to that she was on a paid internship at QAD Inc, a Santa Barbara based Software company, as a Research and Development Operations Analyst.

 

She loves to travel and hopes to do more in the near future. She’s spent time in Siberia, Thailand, and Northern Ireland. She told us, “one thing I love about San Francisco, is the nations are here - that and good coffee... I'd be at Blue Bottle Coffee Company in SF everyday if possible.”

We are stoked to have KJ helping us out. She’ll be a great addition to our team and I’m sure you’ll start to see some of her influence soon!

Interesting Articles

Here are a couple interesting articles I stumbled on today.

• Using the Cloud to Guard Against Vendor Lock-In – DataMation
• Google, Microsoft compete to be 'platform of the world' - CNet

What customers are doing with their Basecamp Backups

When we first set out to build a backup product for online applications we were thinking purely of our own needs. As an organization that was dependent on some of the online applications that we were using we wanted to be sure that we maintained control of our data (much of it critical to the running of our business). It wasn’t long before we discovered that other people were interested in the same types of tools. The way that we used our own product and how we envisioned other people using our product was to get continuous backups of our data in case of a disaster, like us accidentally deleting something or some wider accident in the data center of our online apps. What has most surprised me with our Basecamp backup product has been the different reasons why our customers are using our product and the end result of what they do with their backups.

I’ll highlight some of the more interesting usage scenarios over a few posts. The one scenario that has been most interesting to me is that of larger companies that are using Basecamp. These are medium size companies with a few thousand employees that have their own IT departments. The IT groups run decent size data centers and manage the operations of lots of internal applications. Their business groups have begun playing around with online applications and many of them have embraced Basecamp and are using it extensively. Whether or not the IT department likes this move, they realize that it is inevitable and have decided to figure out how to make it work while still keeping business moving forward. These IT groups already have existing backup procedures, policies and tools. But none of these things work with online applications like Basecamp, but Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp provides a mechanism for them to integrate Basecamp backups into existing processes.

Once a company signs up for automatic scheduled backups of their Basecamp files , Writeboards and data with Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp they begin receiving their data. Their data is all delivered to them by Dropbox or FTP which gets their data into their network and onto one of their computers. From there they use their existing backup tools (CA ArcServe Backup, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft Systems Center) and processes to create a managed archive of that data that is stored to tape or whatever backup mechanism they are using. In the event of an accidentally deleted file they have the opportunity to check the backups that Centripetal Retrieve delivers to them and if their data is still available on their host computer they can use that file. But since they clear those backups off from time to time they may need to access the data from one of their archives that is on tape or something else. They can utilize their existing restore processes to retrieve the needed data and files and restore it back to their host machine from which they are able to re-upload the file back into Basecamp. I haven’t heard of anyone needing to do a restore yet, but I’m sure the IT managers have a little more peace of mind knowing that they have the ability to do so if the need should arise.

Weekly Release

We’re back on our weekly release cadence after our launch. The changes this week are relatively small as we are spending a lot of time on marketing our product (something we know zilch about). Here is the list of changes:

In the Web Application:

• We added in the Jumbo Job. We’ve been testing this for awhile in the back end engine, but just now made it available. This job will retrieve up to 75 GB of data, Files and Writeboards from Basecamp and then do incremental backups of the changes on a daily basis. This maps to the Basecamp Premium Plan.

In the Core Engine:

The primary changes in the Core engine were bug fixes.

• We fixed a bug with downloading Writeboards. Sort of a weird one where the encoding got messed up logging into the Writeboard when the user who last updated the Writeboard was different than the user our application was configured to log in as.
• Another bug was discovered by one of our customers was around login to Dropbox. The encoding of passwords with a couple of characters, specifically HTTP URL reserved characters, was getting messed up and causing the login to fail.

Our product covered on the 37Signals Product Blog

The team at 37Signals was kind enough to write up a blog post about our product. The ability for a Basecamp customer to backup all of their files, data and Writeboards on a regular schedule has been a long time request of the Basecamp team. There have been numerous discussions about it, even people practically begging and threatening for it. This capability is exactly what Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp does, and we work hard to make it the most comprehensive backup solution for Basecamp. So we really feel like we have a product that is beneficial to 37Signals, and more importantly, to their customers.

Check out the blog post at http://productblog.37signals.com

Comparison with our competition

A potential customer recently wrote to me to ask for a comparison between Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp and a competitor of ours. I thought it was good information so I am sharing my response with everyone here.

 

Thanks for checking us out. The differences that I have seen are as follows:

1) Our service works. I have had an account with our competitor for a few months now and am yet to receive any files or data from my Basecamp backup with them. They are very focused on growing their user base around twitter and gmail and seem to have let their Basecamp integration lapse. Basecamp's login process recently changed and it may be that this competitor has not updated their system yet, although it didn't work for me prior to that change either. I would love to hear if you are able to get it working. From our side, we are focused exclusively on being the best at backing up Basecamp. We support backing up all data, files and Writeboards. Because we are more narrowly focused in what we are doing we are able to more quickly react to changes from Basecamp and keep our service working. We have been in beta for about a month and a half in which we did consistent back ups for about 30 customers. Just yesterday we completed a backup for a customer in our full release, that had 42GB of files and delivered it to their Dropbox account. We will add services in the future, but we will always strive to be the absolute best and most comprehensive backup solution for each service we do and will not ever let our integrations lapse. We want to build a product that our customers can depend on.

2) While our competitor is free now, their model is to charge based on the amount of data you store with them, which with a significant amount of data, may cost more than our service. Our plans and pricing will always be transparent so that you know exactly how much you will be getting billed each month, it is not going to change based on an amount of data or anything else that may surprise your wallet. We will likely offer a managed storage solution as an option with a set rate not based on a per GB storage cost, but right now we give your data to you. This can be done via FTP or Dropbox.

3) Another difference is on the focus of each company in the options provided. Our competitor is focusing on giving their users lots of options on what services to backup, they support twitter, facebook, gmail, flikr, etc. We have chosen to focus in on Basecamp exclusively for the current time and provide the options on the storage side of the equation. We currently allow you to choose to have your files stored by Dropbox or FTP. We are working on a DVD mailing service as well as some other online storage options. We have heard from our customers that they want to integrate their data into existing backup solutions that they have and that they don't want to just copy their data to yet another cloud storage system, they want to have it on their computers. So this is where we have chosen to focus our efforts.

4) Building out lots of service integrations is probably the right thing for our competitor to do, they are focused more on the consumer side of things and consumers will likely want more of a breadth type of offering. We are focused on business users and this drives us to work very hard on reliability and correctness of the service. It is not ok to our customers for the service to work some of the time or most of the time, it has to work all of the time. As companies move more and more of their data into cloud based applications they want to know that those services are going to be available to run their businesses, so when they invest in a backup product for those services they also want to be sure that the backup is going to work all the time in the event that something happens that causes them to need that backup.

In the mean time, our competitor is free and we offer a 30 day free trial so you can certainly run your own comparison of the two services. If you do I would love to hear about what you find out.

Another giveaway

We have even more software to give away. This time we’re running another contest based on survey respondents. Fill out our 2 question survey about what online business applications you use at work and we’ll enter you into the drawing for a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Professional.

Fill out the survey

What happens if your SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS vendor closes shop?

 

In response to the following topic on a SaaS forum:

I haven't seen a lot of direct answers to this topic, so I'd like to hear from SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS providers on how they answer this question for their customers. What assurances to give them against this possibility? What contingencies are typically built into contracts?

I posted the following response:

Even though most people here say that their product allows for backups or exports of data the truth is that most SaaS applications don't have this capability at all, or have it in a limited fashion that would be extremely difficult to migrate elsewhere without a ton of work. These concerns about data ownership and disaster recovery (ie. going out of business) are some of the top concerns that our partners hear on a daily basis in their sales calls. For larger deployments many customers are demanding escrow type solutions for their data or other legal mechanisms for addressing their concerns.

Having a backup or export functionality as part of the solution that a customer is buying is often not actually a viable option. So many of these export capabilities in SaaS apps require an administrator to go in and make a request through a webpage and then go back and download it once the export has been completed and an email sent notifying them of it. For an organization that has backup solutions in place, adding a manual step is likely to get missed, error prone, and untenable. When IT wants to back up an application in their own data center they automate every step of it using highly sophisticated backup tools. This is one of the things that is hindering adoption of SaaS. There is a need for SaaS applications to be able to play nice with existing IT infrastructure and processes and they currently just don't do that.

This is what my company, Centripetal Software, is attempting to address. There is a need to extend IT out from within the organization to the SaaS applications that the Line Of Business wants to use. Bringing critical business data back into the organization is a key requirement for many, and this must be done reliably and in an automated fashion. Our product, Centripetal Retrieve, integrates with existing cloud based applications to provide full and incremental backups of data and files and integrate them into IT infrastructure within an organization. http://www.centripetalsoftware.com

Patient Education Systems Case Study

Patient Education Systems is a customer of Centripetal Software using our Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp product. We recently met up with Cordell Baanhofman, Vice President of Technology and Corporate Development at Patient Education Systems, to find out a little bit more about why they chose Centripetal Retrieve to backup their files, Writeboards and data from Basecamp. We wrote up our findings as a short case study.

 

The Customer
Patient Education System (PES) is focused on helping Physicians, their staff and vendors improve the patient experience at the point of care. Designed by physicians for physicians and their patients, their digital media platform seamlessly connects doctors, patients and vendors together in a private “one to one” channel of communication.

The Challenge
PES has two key vendors using Basecamp extensively. Both use Basecamp to manage projects and share deliverables, reports and invoices with PES. The Basecamp accounts are owned and managed by the vendors, PES has been granted access as a collaborating company within the vendor’s account.

The team at PES has 3 main challenges that they are dealing with in their collaboration with their vendors in Basecamp:

1. As a company that is entrusting their core intellectual property to 3rd party vendors, PES wants to ensure that they always have access to their data and files even in the unlikely case where there is break in the relationship that causes a loss of data and deliverables. They tried downloading everything manually as it changed, but the number of files and amount of data was too much to keep up with and it was an inefficient use of time.
2. As they are dealing with multiple vendors and multiple Basecamp accounts they struggle with the continuity of the data as it spans different locations that they need to access. This makes it difficult to locate specific files or data and to keep all deliverables synchronized.
3. Many of the deliverables that they receive from their vendors are large zip files that must be downloaded individually. Searching through the contents of these files across multiple accounts and numerous versions can also be difficult in addition to the need to download so many files one by one.

The Solution
PES found Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp and was able to setup an ongoing backup job for each of the Basecamp accounts that held their data, files and Writeboards. They receive a complete backup once a month and incremental backups of all new and updated files 3 times each week. All of this is delivered to their internal FTP server and from there, they are able to keep archives of everything from all their Basecamp accounts in one place and easily search across everything from their desktop.

The Result
PES has greatly increased their level of comfort that they maintain control of their core intellectual property and know that they protected from a potential disaster. They have easier access to everything in one place which they can easily search and access at anytime.

Patient Education Systems – http://www.peshealth.com
Centripetal Software – http://www.centripetalsoftware.com