SaaS Matters – Designing for the Enterprise
With accelerating cloud adoption, backups in the cloud are necessary and the expectation that SaaS will abstract the complexities away has become more important than ever for the best user experience.
Till now, in the world of enterprise backup, on-premises products have been the norm where companies ship a hardware device and let the user be in charge of their data – literally! This means that the user has to go through all the effort of maintaining these hardware devices and ensuring that they can scale alongside the required software. From the very beginning, Clumio realized that enterprises need to remove the complexity of backup and relocate that data to the cloud, where they no longer have to manage it.
The evolution from hardware products to SaaS solutions creates the need for a great interface that resonates with the users, complements their work and increases their productivity. At Clumio, we are solving for these needs in 3 distinct ways.
Simple to Use
Our SaaS backup solution is all about inline deduplication, compression, and encryption at a large scale which places the complexity into our engineering architecture and takes it out of the customer’s hands. This is a great thing! Getting started is as easy as following these 3 simple steps.
We have created flows to make things like applying policies and restoring data very simple and intuitive. This minimizes the learning curve for the user.
Configurable Notifications, Reporting, and Monitoring
With traditional on-prem applications, users were forced to closely monitor the CPU, memory, storage utilization and availability in order to ensure and optimize operations. SaaS removes this burden from the user but that doesn’t mean that they still don’t want to have confidence in where their data is and the metrics that may affect their SLA’s to the business. This gives SaaS designers an opportunity to engage users with contextual dashboards and real-time information. Our reporting engine is built to help the user understand their data and do so as simply as possible. For example, along with reporting and monitoring, the user still would want to be informed when something needs their attention. We have designed the right set of alerts and notifications to provide better actionable insight. Our users have peace of mind with customizable options like sending notifications to a selected set of recipients in their organization.
Non-disruptive Product Updates
One of the other biggest advantages of being SasS-ified is that the engineering team can push new features whenever needed and without interruption in the availability of the service. In fact, we have weekly updates to the platform to deliver new features and fixes to our customers quickly. When this power is handed to the engineering team, it is the design team’s responsibility to make sure that the features are designed in such a way that this process is streamlined and easy for the user – to the point that they don’t even need to touch it. Recently we introduced backup as a service for AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and one fine day it just shows up in our navigation, ready for customer use.
The core of Clumio lies in cloud innovation. We innovate in how we approach design and user-experience problems. This is why we focus on our users in all aspects of design and strive to make our product as simple as possible while still fully delivering against the promise of data protection in and for the cloud. See Clumio in action in this explainer video.
