There has been some very interesting discussion lately about SaaS and whether it leaves users more or less vulnerable than traditional local apps. Discussions looking at the issue from a “SaaS is riskier” perspective have been started by John Dvorak and Matt Asay. Their perspective can be summed up in this quote;
In a SaaS world, even more than in the traditional proprietary world, you are 100% helpless if something goes wrong. Not only do you not have the code (as you would if you had a on-premise desktop/server software), but you also don’t have the IT staff to be able to go in to troubleshoot. You’re completely reliant on the vendor.
Now this got me all excited and hot under the collar and ready to reply as such but luckily Bob at Smoothspan beat me to it (it’s a time zone thing!) with his excellent post here.
I’d recommend reading it all (and Bob does get a little verbose – not sure where he finds the time to write that much!) to anyone contemplating a move to enterprise SaaS and concerned about any potential pitfalls in terms of testing, support and bug identification and resolution.
It should also be requied reading for any of the development people at SaaS startups, their is some system architecture stuff to think about in their to ensure an easy and transparent as possible testing, bug fixing and problem identifying process.
