not for everyone
While hosted services are not for everyone yet, they are for a lot of people – even those eyeing a shiny new sBS box. Any platform that gets its call in support axed for call back support is hurting – and that is what happened to sBS. in a nutshell, without a support contract and you are in need of sbs support, you will wait for a callback. I’ve heard every debate about this, and bottom line is this – as a technology provider, you cannot offer a solution for which there is no reasonable immediate support option. Not so much for the client, but for you. I dont want to wait for a callback while hitting the taco truck, and i’ll be damned if my staff is onsite waiting for the phone to ring. How do you write a procedure around that?? “if resolution cannot be found in 15 minutes, call microsoft to get a callback just in case.” Yeah, its a security blanket – but we like those. its the answer to whatif. and then, it takes the ’support argument’ away from open source, whats left to bash on when redhat support is more accessible than microsoft? nobody knows linux in a small biz environment? bullshit. documentation is king.
Susan Bradley somehow picked up my last post, and I respect her for what she’s done for the community and me, but I dont agree with her cloud opinion. We all use hosted services already. my first was a netcom shell account and email. online banking. online billpay, I havent used a stamp since they were a quarter, sans BoE. CRITICAL things of mine are hosted and totally outside of my direct control. be damned if * were dependent on my internet connection, if my lights are out I’ll go to the coffee shop and KEEP WORKING. try doing that with an on prem box. We’ve all been using cloud services for years, they just haven’t been called that. I understand the argument of security, its something that I am fascinated with…but is a hosted app any more or less secure than your own lan? I mean, if you are truly ’securing’ the lan, you are spending so much on IT already that saving a few bucks on an sbs box is like putting a bumper sticker on a Ferrari – it just isn’t done. What I mean by that is, if the only real diff between hosted and on prem is security – I am going hosted, why spend the money? outsource it.
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Google blog alerts dude. Hosted.
Many of my LOB apps/needs are not dependent on an Internet connection and we have redundancies built in. I can keep working as I’ve designed this in. Right now hosted applications that are trying to be equivalent to my on premises apps are less secure due to maturity. This may change but as it stands today, premises for certain key LOB needs is still ahead of hosted.
As to the support, I’m concerned about this as well. We’re getting too dependent on “community” and I don’t think this is wise. SBS feels like it’s getting more open source than open source at the rate we’re going.
Susan - September 4, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I plan on going back to open source – FreeBSD.
Paul Petitt - September 4, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Susan,
hosted apps don’t necessarily need to be the weak online version. there’s little wrong with taking your LOB software and installing it on a hosted platform. there are so many benefits to doing it this way that justification for traditional network deplyments wanes. access anywhere from multiple platforms and the total cost savings seal the deal for me.
community support for sbs is all we’ve really got at this point. and thats not a totally bad thing – so many problems are solved by peer collaboration, things that never made it to a kb.
Armen - September 5, 2008 at 8:29 am
Hosted Services are going to be as common as $4.00 gasoline, so we better get used to it and figure out what we need to do in our businesses to make money in the cloud.
Customers are asking for it and you know what they are going for it themselves, so what will you do when they call you and say, well we figured it out for ourselves and your services are no longer required.
The time is now to wake up and smell the opportunities that are out there.
Stuart Crawford
Calgary, Canada
http://www.stuartcrawford.com
itsuccess - September 7, 2008 at 6:44 am
“but is a hosted app any more or less secure than your own lan?”
Yes and No.
As a provider of hosted services, the increased intrusion attempts on our hosted boxes vs. the amount of intrusion attempts againsta our SMB LANs isn’t even comparable.
At the end of the day, a successful intrusion into an SMB lan “might” yield something for the would-be thief, but a successful intrusion into a server acting as a central hosting service provider has a much higher chance of yielding something worthwhile. Hence the amount of activity our intrusion detection systems are picking up compared to our customers SMB LAN internet facing routers.
I think this aspect of security in the SaaS is barely looked at, let alone mentioned…
Ben Fisher - September 8, 2008 at 12:20 pm
As a service provider, the trick I feel is showing the business owner how to set up his own hosted services for sure. Offsite Backup for example, why put all the eggs and liablitiy in your basket, and pay for all the infrastructure to set it up, when most SMB’s can just run the software themselves and back the business data to their house?
Education is the name of the game. If you teach a man to fish, he’ll fish on his own, and call you when he needs a bigger boat or a better fishing pole. Too many greedy technology companies are going to lose their *butts* because they would rather make a thousand dollars once than make a dollar a thousand times.
David James - September 16, 2008 at 4:39 pm