One of the fastest growing segments in the software industry is Software as a Service (SaaS). Think of Salesforce, Google Apps, Microsoft Dynamics Online, Netsuite, Zoho, Outright, Shoebox, 37 Signals products, or a myriad of others. These applications run on servers managed by someone other than the customer and the customers access their data over the web. The customer's data is stored on the managed servers and is typically only accessible through the application's user interface or an applications programming interface. As more companies begin to migrate much of their critical data into these applications basic IT principles are becoming a requirement.
The top concerns of customers evaluating SaaS applications revolve around data privacy, security and access. Customers are asking key questions about data ownership, backup, archiving and migration. When a customer's data is stored on the servers of an application provider, the customer still owns that data and a key requirement must be accessing it in a neutral way.
Many SaaS vendors offer complex and expensive options to allow customers access to the applications and data should the vendor cease operation. Few offer options for customers to access data offline during periods of downtime or other issues. Few offer the ability for the customer to restore data in the event of a data loss. And even fewer provide options or even clear instructions that would allow a customer to migrate to a competing service should the customer find a better fit for their business needs or just become dissatisfied with the vendor. In the world of IT these are basic requirements for any software application that a company integrates into their business. And these requirements do not go away because there is a "paradigm shift" with new buzzwords. Businesses must (and they will) demand the basic set of IT requirements for SaaS based applications.
When any business deploys and manages an application within their own data centers they expect that they will integrate that application into their existing set of operations tools. These are tools such as monitoring, virtualization, backups, deployment and so on. Many of the largest systems companies like Microsoft, IBM and HP provide extensive tool sets for managing the data center. The expectation is not that each new application that a company deploys will provide all of this basic IT functionality, rather the expectation is that the application will be capable of being managed by the existing tool set that a company uses. If your company is using Microsoft System Center for deploying applications, monitoring them in production, and backing up their data, you will not require, let alone utilize, that functionality from an application vendor that provides a new software package you are buying. Instead you will require that application vendor to allow their application to be fully managed by System Center.
In much the same way there is an emerging tools market for SaaS and online based applications that will provide much of the basic IT infrastructure that businesses have come to expect in their own data centers. Many of these tools such as online monitoring tool vendor Pingdom are already well established. There are many more companies that are being founded even now that will fill in across the remaining IT service gaps.
About Us:
Centripetal Software products, Aanhou Retrieve™, Aanhou Archive™ and Aanhou Migrate™, provide the ability for a customer of a SaaS application to retrieve full and incremental snapshots of their data so that they can access it at anytime, archive it in ways of their choosing, or migrate to competing services with zero downtime. Sign up today to join our beta program or to be alerted as new products are made available.
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