Your Data and SaaS

The topic of ‘trusting’ your data to a third party when it comes to SaaS is sure to be around for some time to come.  While I don’t think it’s a useful topic just from a security standpoint, I think it’s a valid concern in a larger context. I think there are three elements of Your Data and SaaS, Security of your Data, Accessibility to your Data and Backup of your Data. While some might argue these are different elements of product selection, I think they can be grouped into the single element of ‘Your Data’ for consideration.

I’m going to skip the discussion on Security here for the most part. I’ll only link to Phil’s article here and note that if you are unsure if Google’s application security, or that of many of the small players in the industry, is less secure than the laptops of any of your employees (or perhaps even their desktops in some cases) then you are significantly uninformed. 

I do want to touch on the other two.

When you use a SaaS product what do you do if you’re not connected or if the provider is down? How to you get access to your data and continue to work with it? Accessiblity is important and that is why Offline support is going to continue to grow as a key feature in all SaaS offerings in 2007.  If you are a small business considering and comparing SaaS products you should include Offlline support in your selection criteria. If the products your looking at don’t have Offline support now you should ask them when they plan to provide it and, in the meantime, what is the companies system availability like? You’ll want to work with a company that gives you access to your data with high reliability, especially if they don’t have Offline support.

Backup of your data is important. Whether it is provided as a downloadable file or sent to you on CD, you’re going to want to have your own copy for various reasons. The circumstances where your data would be lost by any reputable provider would have to be extremely extensive but theoretically possible and it should be a simple matter to have your own backup of your data. When considering SaaS providers you need to be able to get your own physical copy of your data.

These latter two items are also important in the larget context of Continuity of Business. First, your systems and data are stored in a separate location from your primary business (usually) and second in times of emergency when perhaps your office is no longer available or you must be relocated for one reason or another, using SaaS providers means that your software and data are available to you wherever you are.