New article by Intermedia COO, Jonathan McCormick, launched on eWeek today.
How to Ensure SAAS Providers Are Truly Protecting Your Data
From how to ensure SaaS providers are truly protecting your data to infrastructure requirements – Jonathan discusses it in the article.
First 100% Data Protection Guarantee in Exchange Hosting Industry: Intermedia pushes industry toward greater operational and technical transparency
Today we announced that our hosted Exchange 2010 service includes a 100 percent Data Protection Guarantee. The public guarantee is a first among top software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers and is designed to give customers and partners full confidence that their business-critical data is safe with Intermedia.
“Whenever organizations entrust their data to a third-party, whether via a cloud computing service or a traditional outsourcing arrangement, it’s important to evaluate the vendor’s technical and operational capabilities to fully protect the data,” says Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director of analyst firm THINKstrategies and founder of the SaaS Showplace. “We recommend businesses carefully evaluate the vendors’ ability to verify they have the proper back-up and recovery systems as well as the policies in place to safeguard their records, such as Intermedia’s Data Protection Guarantee.”
“The cost of data loss to a business is too great not to be protected 100 percent,” says Jonathan McCormick, chief operating officer, Intermedia. “Intermedia guarantees not only the reliability of our service, but the complete safety of our customers’ data. Our customers can have peace of mind knowing that their data and communications are protected from any eventuality.”
Click here to read the news release.
With mega-hype – such as the incessant promotion of ‘the cloud’ in IT – inevitably comes a mega-backlash. Witness today’s public relations disaster, where T-Mobile USA has suspended sales of the Sidekick and offered those customers the option of ditching their contracts without penalty because of a ‘cloud failure’ – the servers lost all the data (eg personal contacts) stored on the Sidekick devices with apparently no hope of ever getting it back.
This ‘cloud failure’ has of course led to some nasty headlines from IT writers, like ‘When the Cloud Fails’ (GigaOM) and ‘Cloud Goes Boom’ (InformationWeek). But there’s the problem: there are so many different clouds. Some of them may well be shoddy and some are highly secure and reliable – but they all get lumped under this same ‘cloud’ umbrella.
It is a bit like saying that ‘hobbies are dangerous’ – even though some hobbies are not dangerous at all (playing bridge) but some are very risky (free-climbing the North Face of the Eiger).
Over time, as more – in fact, most – businesses come to rely on ‘cloud’ services, such as hosted Exchange, they will need to discern one cloud from another. Is it a nice, shiny cloud with multiple tier-4 datacenters and multi-site backup, like Intermedia, or is it a drizzly, wispy cloud with questionable reliability and backup? Until that time, we software-as-a-service businesses will need to keep explaining that not all clouds are the same.
Last week, I was fortunate to be able to attend and speak at Microsoft’s Hosting Day, held in Chicago on April 16. Microsoft Hosting Days is an annual event series held in different cities around the world. The goal of these events is to provide hosters, telcos, ISVs, VARs and systems integrators with more knowledge and more tools to help grow their business. I was impressed with the turnout of Microsoft employees, VARs, hosters and SIs, and it was great to see old friends and meet new ones. But what was more impressive was how many people told me that their sales have increased during the past quarter, a period that we all acknowledge was a downturn.
Customers, especially small and medium businesses (SMBs), are increasingly adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) as their preferred model for procuring and consuming software. This makes lots of sense, as SaaS provides customers with many cost, productivity and flexibility benefits.
The problem today with most SaaS offerings, however, is that they are designed as self-contained silos. This of course makes sense, as much of the value of SaaS solutions stems from the fact that they are turnkey. Silos are OK for a single application, or even a small handful of apps. But the reality is that most businesses utilize a wide portfolio of software for different functions. And while businesses are embracing SaaS, few if any, will be able to move completely to the cloud. Most will end up with a hybrid environment, where some apps are hosted in the cloud, and some remain on-premise. Even those who plan to ultimately move entirely to the cloud cannot do so in one mass migration. They will need to phase out on-premise applications in a staggered approach, and will have to manage a heterogenous environment of hosted and on-premise software throughout the process.
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Today, Intermedia officially updated its service level agreement to guarantee 99.999% uptime, from the 99.99% we guaranteed in our previous SLA. While this may seem like a fairly small technical change, I think that this is a great representation of Intermedia’s philosophy for future success in a market that is quickly becoming very crowded.