Should You Be Concern About SaaS Security?

At Pointivity we offer many IT services to our clients and one in particular is gaining popularity - our SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution. The IT industry is currently moving quickly to adopt SaaS to help customers control costs and take advantage of a shift towards the increasing availability of data and applications away from a traditional office setting. As the SaaS trend continues, there is also the growing concern over the security of SaaS delivery model versus on-premise solutions.

According to a recently article published on MessagingWire by Michael Osterman of Osterman Research, there are some misconception that the SaaS delivery model is less secure.

He points out the specific fears that decision makers have with regard to hosted/SaaS solution and went on to provide two key takeaways from his research findings:

• Education should be priority to help decision makers understand how their on-premise infrastructure and data transmission stacks up against SaaS solutions.
  
  
• Realize internal security procedures may be giving them a false sense of security. In many organizations, any employee can gain access to a server room or a backup tape quite easily, leaving the organization vulnerable to serious data loss.

For Pointivity we’re able to offer better security because we have access to more resources than most organizations do with their on-premise implementations. All our hosted/SaaS solutions are housed at a state-of-the-art SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards No.70) Type II compliance data center, reflecting a consistent, reliable and secure operating environment to support customers worldwide. In addition, our 24x7 help desk is staffed by certified engineers that can provide both remote and onsite technical support for desktops, servers, network, routers, firewalls and other IT infrastructure.

Unlike traditional hosting providers, we bring process-specific and industry focused experience that help our clients integrate and manage their applications. Hosted in the cloud or onsite, we can assess and quantify the costs of your current technology platform then provide a complete ROI analysis using our infrastructure.

Osterman goes on to suggest that "on average, SaaS providers offer better security than most of their prospective customers because they have a) the resources to do so and b) they have much more to lose if they don’t."

We couldn’t agree more, supporting our client’s infrastructure is what we do, it’s our business and our core focus.

Do you have questions about SaaS? Are you interested to learn more about how Pointivity can transition your business into the hosted model? Contact us.

Survive and Recover: Why You Need to Expand Your Offering

The numbers are in: consumers are saving more than they're spending, and that spells trouble for businesses. This means the recovery will likely to be slow because businesses will continue to be cautious on IT spending due to consumer cut backs.

Unlike the March period, when no customer segment was spared, SMB and public sectors improved somewhat while large accounts continued to deteriorate,

according to the latest report from Raymond James.

However, instead of focusing on the bad news, service provider should take into consideration that small businesses will continue to embrace the hosted service model, or the "cloud." The days of large capital expenses (CAPEX) are gone and the new way of doing business is the monthly pay-as-you-go (OPEX) SaaS model.

If you're a VAR or a MSP, ask yourself this: How are you staying competitive with enhanced services or new product offerings? What are you doing to lower the cost of your customers' IT costs?

Contact us if you're interested to learn more about our Total Outsource Solution or our private label hosted services will help you expand your offering.

One in Five Enterprise to use Hosted Email in 3 Years

According Gartner, surge in hosted email will likely to represent 20% of the commercial email market by 2012 even though it was only at 1% in 2007.

The report stated that:
"Gartner's E-Mail SaaS Threatens Third-Party Vendors report warned that traditional third-party product vendors will suffer in four key areas.

Applications core to the running of on-premise email, such as disaster recovery, and spam and virus filtering tools, will be significantly affected by the move to SaaS email solutions, as will applications that extend the email platform, such as encryption and archiving.

Client-side applications, meanwhile, may not be affected initially, but are likely to decline as the prevalent storage model moves from client to server side, and users access emails via a browser rather than a client."

We have been helping partners to deliver IT smarter with a wide range of products in our hosted model starting with hosted Exchange, SharePoint (collaboration), archiving & compliance and wireless email.

Simply put, on-premise is not looking good as the cloud (hosted) model gains adoption and accelerates in this economy.