When Testuff was established the founders discussed what would be the right model for it. SaaS (Software as a Service) was the lucky winner. The decision was made since we figure that small companies don’t like and can’t afford to keep lot’s of servers around. They take up maintenance time, machines and IT guys cost money, and all in all cause an obstruction from the main gig, from testing.
Also, we had the exemplary success of Salesforce.com, a hosted CRM service. We figured if people are willing to host data about their customers online, one of the most valuable assets of a company, they shouldn’t have much trouble hosting their test data online.
Right? Wrong. From time to time I get an email from one of our customers that reads more or less as follows:
I really like Testuff. Do you have a local installation of the Testuff server? We don’t want to keep our testing data outside the internal network and depend on a hosted service.
Looks like people are reluctant to keep their testing data online. It seems to stem from several fears about SaaS, fears that you may have as well. I’d like to address these fears directly in a short series of posts and see if they make sense. That is, if you’re worse off having your test data hosted than hosting it yourself in the internal network.
In the meantime, let me know what you think about SaaS! Do you use any hosted services other than Testuff? If so, which ones? What do you like about them? If you don’t use any SaaS, what are your concerns?
blogstuff
November 20th, 2008 - 3:50 pm
We are using and providing online crm, http://www.salesnexus.com. I love the customer support and the fact that the data is available online anytime, in real time and there is no downtime in their services. You can also sync with your phone and link the database to your website to capture incoming leads and setup automated marketing campaigns.
November 20th, 2008 - 6:32 pm
We are in the development business – outsourcing SaaS development for ISV’s. But, with that caveat, we use a lot of SaaS and many hosting services both for our own productivity apps and for our customers.
My personal experience is most (not all) CIOs and CEOs, that say their are concerned about keeping their data “outside the firewall” are in denial. The truth is, especially in this market, they are constantly looking for ways to “cut corners” in their own house. Patches go months without install, server refresh is put off for months beyond end of life, security infrastructure limps along at the level that is easy to maintain, not the best implementaiton for the situtation. Very few small to medium IT shops would pass a serious audit.
If this is true (and I have found it again and again on site with customers) SaaS vendors should be proactively and transparently addressing these issues. What is the server refresh policy (if you’re not in the cloud)? If you’re in the cloud – what SLAs are provided by the hosting source? What impact do they have on the SLA you pass down to your customer (realizing it is not a one to one proposition). What SaaS vendors have to offer is in truth an upgrade for most IT shops, but it is rarely marketed as such. There are lots of ways that SaaS vendors minimize their risk that in the end improve the quality of service to their end customors. Sell them!
November 24th, 2008 - 1:21 pm
[...] week I started a series of posts to examine why people are afraid of SaaS. So, let’s dive in and examine one of the fears that I have seen come up all too often – fear [...]
March 30th, 2009 - 2:31 pm
For what it’s worth, I love the SaaS model. Just as a real-life example, I use Mozy, the ultimate fire-and-forget SaaS backup service (no, I don’t work for them, but I work just down the street from them, so who knows?). I take comfort in the fact that all my stuff is backed up off-site. Ditto Testuff. I could be wrong, but I assume that Testuff redundancy is far better than our RAID-1 server. This is correct, right?
March 30th, 2009 - 2:57 pm
Yep. We employ multiple levels of redundancy at Testuff. We obviously have our server disks running over RAID 0+1 or RAID 5, plus we have our full server images backed up. When it comes to customer data, we also keep separate copies of all user data replicated across more than one server and our servers are located within different data centers worldwide.
We have restored customer data upon request to a specific point in time within an hour for the previous 24 hours, or lower resolution for daily, weekly and monthly snapshots. We have also successfully carried out full DR exercises, migrating a complete server from one data center to another with minimal downtime to our customers.
We still encourage customers to use our API to regularly and automatically export their test data to Excel, and customers can also manually export specific data to HTML or Excel if they choose to.