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Food for thought (indegestion optional).

muzza2005 11th Apr 2009

This article is a sales pitch aimed at company decision-makers:- lose all those pesky IT workers and welcome to the new nirvana.

And a Clariion call (thank you EMC) to you all in IT who are going to get the push so your non-IT workers can just push the mouse around to do what they want...

SaaS vendor: said workers won't get employment with the vendor as they are intent making it as 'lights-out' as they can, i.e. 'wetware-lite'.

Tight market, squeezed margins - sharpened trust: how much do you trust a SaaS not to delete, lose, screw up, steal or sell you data? More importantly, how would you know. Answer you wouldn't... and 'trust me, I'm a SaaS vendor' is under Data Risk Management 101 as 'do not pass first semester; go back to kindergarten'.

Saas reputations are fragile, as one whiff of scandal and bang goes their business. Conversely, one whiff of screw-up and possibly bang goes your entire business.

Interim: do the cloud internally - keep control of your infrastructure and data; in time elements can move to the SaaS.

Lastly, how many of you in the USA routinely whip out your laptop and plug it into the Lexus/Ford/GM/BMW/whatever management system and re-tune your car? You dont - too complex under the hood now; good old days of spanner and screwdriver with the hood up don't exist. Likewise IT - keep your people and skills up to date and inhouse, otherwise you'll be waiting a long time at the edge of the data superhighway when you app/server blows a gasket and/or wondering why your competitor suddenly got your clients coz some backdoor .exe stole your data...

Don't get me wrong: there is value in SaaS, as long as your risk analysis / mitigation is acceptable to you: don't gamble what you can't afford to lose.