Cloud Considerations

For SMB’s thinking of dipping their toes into the waters of SaaS (Software As A Service) Karl Palachuk has some great due diligence questions to think about on his Small Biz Thoughts blog.

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SaaS – When Policies Change, Are You In Or Out?

A Change In Policy

We use a hosted, online Software as a Service tool. It is not a huge or complex one, but use it for a key internal function.

As the possibility of the vendor going out of business, shutting down, or being aquired always exists, we negotiated at the outset that we wanted periodic copies of our data.

In this case, the vendor was simply supplying a raw backup of the database. In the event they did shut down, our development team could at least extract the data for import into any other tool that we wished to use.

A few weeks ago I stopped getting that data backup.

An email with their tech support was responded to with this;

Hi Elliot,

I am with XXXXX support. I tried to contact you few minutes back to discuss this issue and reached your voicemail. I left a voicemessage for you. Currently there are some changes in our company policies because of which database backups are not provided

The SMB Takeaway

Using software applications ‘out in the cloud’ has some benefits. But there are risks.

In this case our data backup strategy for our corporate data had the rug pulled out from underneath it.

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Photo Credit JM3 via flickr

Non US Risks in The Clouds

Dana Gardner has a good piece on some of the risks and expectations with Cloud Computing on the briefingsdirect blog.

I suspect that the majority of survey was American organizations.

For those of you outside the United States, an issue that is not mentioned is the law.

As a Canadian company, if that cloud data is in California – what legal jurisdiction is it under – Canadian, or California?

Same issue if you are under European ‘Safe Harbour’ legislation.

This issue becomes even more complicated if you consider trade laws.

For example, Canada has relations with Cuba, the US still does not.

If one of our customers is in Cuba – but that Customer data is in a cloud in the US………..

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Photo Credit zerega via flickr

The Beginners Guide to the New IT

Vinnie Mirchandani at the New Florence. New Renaissance. blog pointed me to this Economist special report titled; ‘A special report on corporate IT’ .

It is a great non – technical look at the trends shaping the IT world, from ‘Cloud’ Computing, through the mobile future.

And like Nicholas Carr’s IT Doesnt’ Matter, it describes how we have migrated from the individual craftsman (Administrators) to the standardized, commoditized building blocks that enable this next wave.

Virtualization – What SME’s Want

Courtesy of the Ottawa Network and Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP I had the opportunity to attend a casual panel on the concept of virtualization.

The technology aspects of the discussion ranged from abstracting hardware right up through the application layer and the current buzzword of cloud computing.

But for the my audience in the SMB / SME space.  Outside of the panelists, there were two questions that I found say it all,

He Says; IT Doesn’t Matter

Just Plug It In

One gentleman, (A small business owner) whose name I was not able to get, asked when he would just plug in a display type of device into a wall and have his computing environment.

(If I was able to, I would have given him copies of Nicholas Carr’s IT Doesn’t Matter and the Big Switch )

She Says; She Can’t Give it Away

The second interesting point was from Fay Khazai, President of a SMB that supplies a software suite for some SMB verticals.

These business are reluctant to use her hosted offering – for one reason. They cannot rely on their internet connections.

These SMB’s rely on lower end offerings connectivity from their providers such as DSL and cable for their internet connections. No connection – no business.

There you have the SMB dichotomy. Can I give you an answer for this?

No, sorry I cannot.

Panelists:

Mike Kemp: CTO Liquid Computing

Jean-Marc Seguin: Chief Architect, Embotics

Miro Adamy: Founder, Thinknostic

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