Seven Habits of Highly Effective SaaS
The holiday season is upon us. This is the time for jolly and self-reflection. The core of an information technology professional’s career has always been about vendor selection and relationship management. As an IT/ISV professional prepares himself/herself for the brand new decade ahead, it is time to reflect on existing relationships and reinvent oneself for the needs of tomorrow. Because there is so much jazz about SaaS in tech news streams, we thought the time is right to reflect on what makes up a highly effective SaaS experience – a reflection on what our customers, investors, and partners have been sharing with us all along. These are the seven habits you need to look for to get the most from SaaS.
It delivers a service, not just a subscription
A highly effective SaaS is Software as a Service, not just a subscription pricing program for pre-packaged software and/or hardware. What made Workday superior from day 1 when compared to those pre-packaged human resource management systems of yesterday? The former was built from the ground up to deliver a service and organizations simply consumed that service on-demand. No more babysitting software, servers, and storage.
Clumio is designed to be a highly effective SaaS backup solution for enterprises. It is purpose-built with a service mindset. With Clumio, you can set up an account and start protecting your data in less than 15 minutes. No more building and maintaining backup systems with bricks and blocks.
It doesn’t manage complexity, but eradicates it altogether
A highly effective SaaS delivers value end-to-end. It is not just a management layer for a complex fleet of individually packaged software/hardware systems. Federating a complex layer of systems while those systems themselves need to be nurtured individually is a capability available on many CRM systems built for on-premises, but that doesn’t make a legacy system equivalent to SalesForce CRM, does it?
Clumio eradicates the complexity of running backups and ensuring compliance. You are no longer managing a fleet of backup systems from a central user interface. You are consuming backups as a service delivered from cloud with stateless data movers working on your behalf to move data on-demand. You define the desired business outcomes via one or more declarative policies, and Clumio takes care of ensuring global compliance across data sources both on-premises and in the cloud.
It exploits the elasticity of the public cloud for you
A highly effective SaaS takes advantage of public cloud for your benefit. Public cloud is just not about renting someone else’s compute and storage. If you lift and shift traditional software to run in the public cloud, you haven’t exploited the true value of cloud computing. There are several data warehousing and analytics solutions for on-premises. And you can take those to the cloud as-is, but that does not give you the value of Snowflake.
Clumio is born in the cloud and is architected to take advantage of the unlimited power of cloud coupled with its extreme elasticity. Protect a few data sources or several thousand data sources. You are not bogged down in planning, designing and deploying backup systems or clusters to run your backups. Clumio takes advantage of the elasticity of cloud to bring compute and storage resources. You simply convey your intent in declarative policies and Clumio service scales on-demand to meet your requirements.
It will pass granularity tests with flying colors
A highly effective SaaS delivers value irrespective of the size of your footprint. The best way to test the effective SaaS nature of a service is to ask for the smallest unit of consumption. SalesForce lets you buy per user per month. Others may need you to buy bundles, and that signals there are fixed costs behind the scene to breakeven. Imagine the stress you might have had when a vendor’s backup system or cluster is nearing its capacity? How about the time when you were evaluating an alternate solution but the clock had been running out and a renewal contract was due for the legacy system?
With Clumio, you have predictable costs. You can start at any size and change things on-demand. That means you are no longer forced to plan ahead. You can add more data sources as needed. You can retire data sources when you don’t need them.
It eliminates the need for multi-vendor management
A highly effective SaaS will offer ‘single-vendor’ experience. The key operational challenge with build-your-own-solutions had been the need to triage among vendors who were providing its building blocks. In the unfortunate event that something does go wrong, you are forced to manage and resolve problems across vendors. Unfortunately, the wanna be SaaS backup solutions today tend to keep you in the same past. They tout a ‘bring your own cloud infrastructure’ model. The reality here is that the vendor is delegating backup infrastructure management to YOU. When something goes poorly, the vendor has the room to point fingers elsewhere in your cloud infrastructure.
With Clumio, you are getting a vertically integrated SaaS backup solution. You no longer worry about keeping the lights on for your backup infrastructure, because you not renting resources and putting things together – rather consuming an end-to-end service!
It takes ownership of data security and compliance
A highly effective SaaS owns security and compliance responsibility of your data under its wings. The wanna be SaaS backup products today tend to offload these key responsibilities onto you under the disguise of the ‘bring your own cloud infrastructure’ model. But a closer look would reveal the key flaw. The vendor is delegating security of the cloud infrastructure and compliance of data in the cloud to YOU. Now it is on you to make sure things are setup right to keep your data safe.
When it comes to Clumio, security and compliance is no longer your problem alone. Clumio SaaS service is processing and storing data on your behalf. Hence we consider it to be our responsibility to ensure both the security of the cloud infrastructure and the security and compliance of your data in the cloud. This #SecurityFirst mindset and design not only keeps your information safe but also ensures that you are not left in the cold, in the unfortunate and unlikely event that something does go wrong.
It stays out of your way so that you can focus on your core business
A highly effective SaaS is invisible during steady state. As a busy leader, you had been effective in delegating non-core responsibilities. What if your delegate requires you to guide him in each and every step? This is how wanna be SaaS operates. This is because traditional software repackaged for a monthly subscription is still traditional software that needs constant nurturing.
Clumio SaaS backup takes care of your data protection and compliance needs while letting you focus on running your core business. Clumio is designed to become your highly effective delegate who involves you only when there are key decisions or actions that need your approval.
Would you like to see a highly effective SaaS backup in action? Contact us.
Happy Holidays! Here comes a brand new decade where IT will have a #SaaSFirst motto before building anything on your own, be it in the data center or in the cloud.
