SaaS spells relief for small business

by John Magee

June 9, 2008 —

As small businesses feel the pressure to survive in the current state of the
economy, relief is emerging in the form of software-as-a-service (SaaS). For
small businesses in particular, the introduction of a growing range of SaaS
solutions could not have arrived at a better time. SaaS is delivered through
an online service that offers a low maintenance, cost-effective alternative
to on-premises solutions. What's more, SaaS solutions are now more secure and
easier than ever to integrate into an existing infrastructure.

With an expanding range of viable SaaS solutions now available, small businesses
need to evaluate the most appropriate service for their environment by considering
the cost, complexity, flexibility, and integration issues associated with today's
online services.

Where to Begin?

Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of SaaS implementation is simply
deciding which application is most appropriate to outsource. In the past, SaaS
offerings were limited to applications such as enterprise resource planning,
customer relationship management, and the like. Now, however, companies are
also looking at online infrastructure services-applications such as backup and
storage that protect and store mission critical data.

Online backup is one such service. It can help small businesses deal with a
challenge shared by their large enterprise counterparts: exponentially growing
data volumes. Never before have businesses had so much electronic information
to store, manage, and protect. In fact, a March 2007 report by IDC Research
found that external disk storage capacity will increase by 50 percent annually
on average through 2011 and will require a corresponding data protection capacity.

Regardless of their size, businesses must be able to store, protect, manage,
and if necessary, recover their important business information. If not, they
risk exposing their business to downtime, and damage to reputation. While large
enterprises tend to have greater IT resources and personnel to address these
issues in-house, small businesses often do not have these luxuries.

However, online backup presents a new opportunity for small businesses by giving
them all the benefits of enterprise-class backup without the associated management
complexity and cost. Better yet, as more mature backup vendors offer their software
through an online delivery model, small businesses can be sure their data is
safely in the hands of proven experts.

Getting Started

So, just how does online backup work? How much data can be stored? How often
is it backed up? Is it secure? And can it be easily recovered?

Start by looking for a solution that makes it easy for you to get started and
allows you to customize your service to your business needs. Transitioning to
an online backup service, for example, can be done via a browser and a simple
online interface that enables the IT administrator to choose from a range of
service plans. By pointing and clicking, the administrator identifies how much
data (in gigabytes, typically) to be backed up and for how long (usually anywhere
from one to seven years). Because such services use a pay-as-you-go model based
on service and capacity, costs are predictable for as long as the company uses
the service. Look for a service that lets you adjust usage up or down, ideally
without penalty.

Once the service plan is selected, the administrator then downloads an agent
to each of the computers that the company wants backed up; the agent typically
requires only 50 MB or so of free disk space. It is important to note that the
most sophisticated online backup services require that an administrator-defined
encryption passphrase be used on each computer on which the agent is installed.
They also offer a mechanism for safely storing and retrieving that passphrase.

Online backup services will back up a wide range of data-from documents and
databases to email-and the administrator chooses which information types to
be backed up. The administrator can also add users to the services and assign
them roles depending on the privileges they should have as well as specific
computers on which they can use the online backup service. With virtually every
employee wearing more than one hat in a small business environment, this flexibility
is critical.

Features and Functionality

While ease-of-setup and use can make transitioning to online backup fairly quick,
the specific features and capabilities like multi-version save, recover and
restoration of critical data make online backup the safety net on which small
businesses can rely for data protection.

For example, online backup services can actually keep historical copies of
data, as opposed to just the latest version. This is essential in meeting retention
requirements established by industry or government regulations. Some online
backup services will keep more than 100 revisions of a file.

In addition, these services will also save multiple versions of data, using
a technique of fading granularity to ensure that copies of the most recent changes
to a file are kept and progressively fewer copies are saved as the file ages.
In other words, if a file is being changed regularly, the changes -- not the
entire file -- are backed up every 10 minutes or so. Day-old versions of that
rapidly changing file are then rolled into hourly copies. The hourly copies
are kept for two or three days, after which they are rolled up to create a daily
copy -- a full copy of the latest version for that day. A similar process continues
so that daily versions are rolled up into weekly versions, which are eventually
rolled up into monthly and then yearly versions.

By providing so many versions, these online backup services also ease recovery
so that organizations can restore not just the latest version but the best version,
even if it was accidentally overwritten locally.

Provider and Facility Matters

With trusted vendors now offering online backup services, small businesses no
longer have to wonder if their data will be safe offsite or if their provider
will still be in business years from now. Today's leading vendors have state-of-the-art
backup infrastructure in redundant, multi-tenant data centers staffed round-the-clock
by IT experts. They also ensure that data is encrypted on the client side and
that the data center does not have access to it.

Of course, many small businesses require credible proof that a SaaS vendor
will provide a consistent, stable, and secure environment to safely manage their
data. To that end, organizations can look for providers whose facilities have
earned independent, third-party accreditation. Among the most highly regarded
are those issued by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA)
Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) 70 Type II. SAS-70 requires an independent
auditor or auditing firm to examine the implemented controls in a service organization
and report on the effectiveness and objectives in place in the service organization.

With new, easy-to-use, feature-rich online backup services now available from
proven leaders in information availability and protection, small businesses
can enjoy the same data management capabilities as their enterprise counterparts,
but without the associated cost and complexity.

For small businesses looking for ways to not only survive but thrive in a changing
economic environment, these innovative online services for backing up, storing,
retaining, and restoring information couldn't have arrived at a better time.

Symantec Corp.