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.
This week, Gartner predicted that worldwide SaaS revenues would grow by 18 percent in 2009. From our perspective, this aggressive prediction – totally at odds with the generally gloomy economic picture – is quite right. Salesforce, the SaaS industry bellwether, continues to grow revenues above 20%, and Microsoft is experiencing very rapid SaaS growth, albeit from a lower base.
Here at Intermedia we are also growing faster than this, but our partners are far exceeding the 18% figure. Exchange and related services revenues for our private label Exchange hosting partners are growing in the region of 65 % per year – and this should only increase further with the recent launch of hosted Exchange 2010.
Gartner does break out different segments of SaaS. Intermedia would fall under the ‘content, communications and collaboration’ group (try saying that 10 times, quickly!), which is predicted to grow around 20% in 2009. Outsourcing business email and unified communications is a logical step for many companies, and often a ‘first taste’ of how well it can work to outsource critical systems to specialist companies.
It seems then that SMBs – which we serve here at Intermedia – are adopting SaaS more rapidly than the market at large. Still, the 18% growth rate for SaaS across the board is still impressive, especially in light of Gartner’s prediction of a 5.2% decline for IT spending as a whole in 2009.
With this week’s launch of hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010, Intermedia commissioned two white papers from industry research firms in order to provide additional tools to the marketplace regarding Exchange 2010 and in particular, hosted Exchange 2010. The below is the second in a series of excerpts from the white paper, “Why You Should Consider Migrating to Hosted Exchange 2010” by Osterman Research, Inc. – available on Intermedia’s web site.
REDUCED PER-SEAT COSTS, ESPECIALLY FOR SMALLER ORGANIZATIONS
Although there are many reasons that organizations should consider the use of hosted Exchange, perhaps the most important reason is its ability to significantly reduce the cost of overall Exchange management. This has traditionally be a chief argument used in attempting to convince very small organizations of the need for hosted Exchange given that the smaller the organization, the higher their per-seat costs for Exchange and other messaging functionality.
However, the ability to cut the cost of Exchange management through hosting is by no means limited simply to small organizations. Much larger organizations – those with hundreds and even thousands of users – can also realize significant cost savings by migrating to hosted Exchange and away from an on-premises Exchange environment. While the cost differences may be most pronounced for the smallest of organizations, even large organizations can see significant reductions in their total cost of managing Exchange by moving to a hosted model for some or all of their users.
MORE PREDICTABLE INVESTMENTS
Closely related to the overall cost savings available in a hosted Exchange model is the more predictable nature of costs with hosted Exchange. Because virtually all hosted providers commit to a fixed cost per seat over the life of an annual or multi-year contract, decision makers can know what the cost of Exchange management will be over the life of the contract. On-premises deployments, on the other, hand, can sometimes necessitate new servers or appliances as a result of rapid increases in the volume of spam or the addition of new users.
MORE EFFICIENT USE OF IT STAFF MEMBERS
A hosted Exchange model can also make best use of scarce IT staff members, allowing them to be used for projects or initiatives that can provide more value to an organization. For example, despite the mission-critical nature of messaging, using seasoned IT staff members to manage Exchange servers, apply patches and the like may not be the best of their time or talent. Instead, using these staff members for initiatives that can provide a differentiation for a company – such as using them to deploy customer-facing technologies to shorten tech support wait times – might be the better choice.
HIGHER LEVELS OF UPTIME
Osterman Research has found that many organizations do not achieve the 99.9% uptime that most hosted Exchange providers guarantee as part of their Service Level Agreement. Hosted Exchange providers can offer a very high level of uptime, usually exceeding that of most on-premises deployments.
BETTER SECURITY AGAINST SPAM AND MALWARE
Leading hosted Exchange providers typically offer very robust security capabilities through the use of multiple malware- and spam-filtering technologies, carrier-grade firewalls and other security measures that often would be cost-prohibitive for their customers to deploy and support. The result of using a hosted Exchange provider is typically (but not always) a higher spam and malware capture rate, lower false positives, and a reduced possibility of malware infiltration.
DATA PROTECTION
Another important benefit of using hosted Exchange is that leading providers will back up their customers’ data and provide rapid data recovery in the event of a server outage or other unforeseen problem. Further, hosted Exchange can provide protection against natural disasters, fires, power outages, floods and other disrupting events that can knock on-premises email systems out for days or weeks. This is particularly true for hosted Exchange providers that operate multiple data centers and replicate customer data to at least two geographically distributed data centers.
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.