Marc has an interesting post looking at strategies for surviving a digital brown out – some take outs from his post;
Go wireless, most businesses have a USB wireless internet dongle or a WiFi internet account for sales purposes anyway
But if the connection is down moving from wired to wireless won’t help. We’re talking an outage with the ISP so local method of connecting don’t affect this
Go to the cafe, most businesses have a cafe nearby that offers their own (or sponsored) WiFi access or an internet cafe as per those used by the backpacker community Go home, most people have cable internet at home now or if not at home then a close family member Go to a partner, most businesses have close trading counter-parties that they deal with who wouldn’t mind you using a desk for a day Go to a serviced office, spend a few dollars and get access at a bureau or a few weeks at a serviced office, they are surprising inexpensive Go to your IT provider and ask them to lend you a desk and a net connection or recommend somewhere
All true – but most users also need data that resides on a local server as well as access to hosted apps so this solution only gives them half of what they need.
Next (and in my mind much more valid) comes Marc’s take on why SaaS is the safest bet for data protection. He says;
[with SaaS] it is usually the subscriber (i.e. you) that has the problem. Sometimes, very rarely it is on the SaaS provider’s end because one of the connections to the NOC (network operations centre/center) fails. This is usually not an issue though because most of the tier one NOC’s have redundant links into them from different directions by different carriers in hardened cable carriers to different Telco’s and then once it gets to the Telco each of them has multi routes to their peer Telco’s too.
A good SaaS provider has meshing resilience. This meshing prevents any single (or multiple even) breaks impacting the total service. We wrote about our amazing strengths in this area recently.
As Transaction Cross Docking (TCD) becomes more common place (because it makes so much sense) this stuff is crucial because it will be global distributed connected communities of millions not just thousands that are impacted.
Which to my mind is the important bit – a big perception barrier to SaaS adoption is the fear of data loss and inaccessibility. The face of the matter is that laptop hard drives, local backing up procedures and lax security protocols inside a business are far bigger threats to data than hosting them remotely.
