SAAS and Security

Here's the downside to SAAS: security breach and down time.

This week Amazon was down twice, which is hard to believe because I can not remember them being unavailable. Yahoo! Mail has had outages. Twitter is constantly down.

Every data center, even those precious Tier 1's, have had outages. When power is out, redundant systems do not always kick in. But you don't know that until that Bad day happens.

And security breaches are happening every week. Comcast's site was hacked. TJ Maxx was broken -- the largest hack ever. Sweetbay Supermarkets was breached. Bank of New York Mellon Loses 4.5 Million UNENCRYPTED Bank Records. Harvard Hacker steals personal information of 10,000 University students and applicants.

What do you do? As a small business how do you prevent the hacks? It's not like BoNYM didn't have good security. It's a full time job to keep intruders out. Firewalls, IDS and other methods can work, if they are configured correctly and actively monitored. How many folks do you think are talented enough to handle that? How much do you think they cost to hire? Exactly.

IT talent is tough to find and even tougher to retain. That's another reason SAAS will be big with small business. Maybe even with medium sized businesses. The problem will be how the SAAS companies handle redundancy, business continuity, back-up, security -- and when that fails Indemnity. Co-Location companies do not offer Indemnity. But if you are handing your data to someone, you will want to know some stuff about them. Like what's being done so that my data is not lost or stolen? What happens if it is? Who pays the fines? What does my Privacy policy say that covers me using an SAAS provider? These are just some of the things to think about when you think about Outsourcing. As long as you audit your vendors, you won't have to think about these things too often.