Fear of SaaS Reliability
Continuing the SaaS series after a short break, we’ve seen that folks are afraid of SaaS security. However, there are further concerns people have with SaaS. One of them is SaaS reliability. The concern may be expressed as follows:
I’m worried about reliability. There might be outages and congestion accessing hosted services on the Internet.
There are outages and congestion issues on the internal network as well. I remember servers going up and down, slow connectivity, and even worms shutting down communication in the whole internal network at one of my previous employers. There’s plenty of maintenance work that gets done in internal networks and the network admins don’t think too much before flipping the switch.
Even if you don’t use any SaaS per se and your internal network is operating at top speed, people can’t work without access to the Internet. Even if just Google.com goes down people stare dumbly at the screen or head to a coffee break. Everyone highly depends on the Internet in the software industry and if there are access problems to the Internet there’s more than just SaaS and Testuff at stake, but also search engines, webmail, knowledge sources like Wikipedia, blogs, and whatnot. In a certain sense of the word, we’re all using SaaS already, we just aren’t aware of it.
Truth of the matter is that SaaS is more reliable than local servers. Just look at uptime logs for site hosting on the net, you will find they are usually above 99%. Even when we had to take Testuff down for a DRP drill, we thought ten times before doing so, notified our customers plenty of time beforehand, and made sure it was for the shortest time possible.
Speaking of which, SaaS companies confirm to the highest reliability standards. Testuff has a DRP and we perform drills to make sure we’re on top of our game. All the Testuff data is backed up regularly and replicated for maximum resilience. We keep constant monitoring on our servers to make sure everything is working at all times.
Do you get this kind of service for your local servers? If so, how much is it costing you? Are you concerned with SaaS reliability? Is your internal network truly reliable? Drop a comment and tell us about it.
As the founder of a new SaaS business (on-demand load testing), I’m really glad to see you do this series (Fear of SaaS). My last startup, founded in 2005, was also SaaS and I ran in to the fear of being offline quite a lot. This time around, I’m not seeing it nearly as much. I think people are realizing that these days you have to pretty much be online to get anything done. We have folks like Google and Salesforce to thank for this.
Security and reliability are more like urban legends and myths to spread fear and caution whenever there’s something new and disruptive. It is perfectly understandable because there’s nothing like experience to back up the claims. It’s no different with cloud computing and Saas at this time but we’re fairly sure they naysayers will come around. ‘Lower cost’ is difficult to ignore especially for business. Hope that SaaS companies not lose faith and use the time to perfect their services and while at it, take the effort to perform more customer service. [Which is also a reminder to us, really].
Best.
Alain Yap
Morph Labs
Not trying to break the SaaS spirit in any way but…
Why not shelling off an appliance* version of your product thus encouraging “fearful” clients to use your product?
Heck, even Google does it!
Some clients might also have national regulatory enforcements prohibiting them from using SaaS conveniently. An appliance might open these markets too. (If you’ll dare to see banks as your clients)
*The JumpBox/VMware model comes to mind and is very friendly…