People tend to follow trends, and certainly the trend towards SaaS is growing. There is a lot of positives associated with on-demand applications, no doubt, but just like other similarly “can’t miss” opportunities (such as Bernard Madoff or Allen Stanford for investments), companies need to be aware of the risks associated with SaaS. Some of these have been highlighted previously, such as losing control of your data, or the long-term costs associated with SaaS are often higher than perpetual licenses, but one that hasn’t got as much attention should give many companies pause – What happens if your SaaS provider goes out of business?
There is always some risk associated with going with a small company, whether it is SaaS or on-premise, but at least with an on-premise solution, a company isn’t put into a short-term bind if their solution provider goes out of business. But in these tough economic times, that is a real risk with SaaS providers. Just ask customers of either Entellium or LucidEra. Both customer bases were put into the precarious position of quickly finding new solutions and figuring out how to get their critical data, which they don’t own or have access to, under their control. Furthermore, these solutions are generally mission-critical to an organization’s operation; so if a company loses access to these critical systems for even a couple of hours, their operation is compromised. And you don’t get to do this on your own timeframe. We all know how IT projects are done on IT’s timeline, and often they take a lot of planning.
So, a word of advice. Do your homework and make sure you consider both the pros and cons in choosing your solution provider.
Until Next Time,
Stephen
