Wednesday, March 24, 2010

SaaS - The Ultimate Dependency on Broadband

My CRM is web-based. My accounting software is web-based. My email marketing tools are web-based. I use Twitter. I use Facebook. I blog (duh). And I love not having to install upgrades, manage a server, secure the data, etc. I love it, that is, so long as I'm connected.

We are entering an era where business cannot function without broadband. No, not just for the speed of ad-hoc transfers such as ftp and email sending and receiving, but for the live streaming connection to business critical data at any given point in time. Imagine the impact of a 50-person call-center, all using an online CRM, and the connection goes down. What's 5-minutes of outage cost that company?

As with every luxury we enjoy, we don't even realize our dependence until we find ourselves without it. My cell phone, for example, is my watch. Really, I stopped wearing a watch when I got a cell phone. Battery dies... I'm nowhere on-time.

The same is true for broadband. A brief outage, even a matter of minutes, halts production. For the increasing number of businesses today resorting to SaaS solutions rather than desktop software, a broadband outage is tantamount to a total system failure. In many situations, the phones go too (especially in a VoIP set-up), and all business-critical activity is put on hold.

And there are going to be far-reaching implications of this shift in software delivery methods. As more and more competitive business software becomes available via broadband, this will preclude rural businesses where broadband is yet unavailable from having any access to the competitive advantages software can offer. The Internet for Everyone organization argues that the gap between have's and have-not's grows today due in part to internet access, and I would agree.

So, what measures can you take to protect your SaaS-dependent company from the turmoil of broadband outage? First, select your service provider carefully. Uptime is almost more important than upstream speeds these days. Second, back-up. No, not data... your connectivity. Having two disparate paths to the web is vital if you don't want those intermittent outages to affect you. And finally, monitor the performance constantly. Don't wait until an outage occurs, notify your service provider of falling signal strength and network "noise" before it causes a bigger problem.

Labels: backup network, Broadband, SaaS