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SaaSOps: Adapting the enterprise model for small and midsize businesses

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SaaSOpsThe term “SaaSOps” was first coined by David Politis, founder of BetterCloud. SaaSOps, short for Software-as-a-Service Operations, is the suite of processes, skills, and responsibilities for managing the lifecycle of software delivered as a cloud service. Most small and midsize businesses use multiple SaaS applications.

By effectively and efficiently managing these applications, we reduce operating costs and security risks.

The 5 SaaSOps Processes

Adapting the enterprise model for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), SaaSOps encompasses the following five processes.

1. Adoption

SaaS Adoption begins with discovery.  Discovery includes both (1) Selecting SaaS applications your business needs or wants; and (2) Identifying the SaaS applications in use by your team. In today’s world of cloud services, individual employees are likely signing up to use SaaS applications that they want or think they need. These are often free, or low cost, consumer oriented services. Often referred to as “Shadow IT”, these apps sit outside your control and outside of your security protections.  Selecting which SaaS applications you will use, as a company, and which you will not, sets the stage for successful operations.

2. Optimization

Optimizing SaaS operations requires cross-application and in-application analysis.  By examining SaaS applications and services, and how they are used, you can identify and remove redundant features and data sets.  Streamlining applications and systems in-use lowers complexity, support requirements, and cost.  Within applications, license management is key to ensure you do not under- or over-license your services.  Beyond the cost implications, unused licenses pose a security risk.

3. Management

SaaS Management includes the lifecycles for both users and applications.  If done well, SaaS Management automates common tasks prone to administrative error.

User lifecycle events focus on properly managing on-boarding, off-boarding, and mid-lifecycle changes.  These events cover accounts, access, security, permissions, and integrations users need to perform their jobs across your SaaS applications and services.  User lifecycle management also includes group management.  The ability to automate group membership based on user attributes gives you the ability to manage uses based on roles and responsibilities.

Application management focuses on application configuration, ensuring accounts, access, security, and data management. Active configuration management creates a dependable service for users.

4. Security

This includes five key integrated security pillars:

  1. Discovery of sensitive data, including data subject to industry or legal regulations.
  2. Mitigation of oversharing of data, externally and within your organization.
  3. App monitoring and remediation, spanning availability, access, and performance.
  4. User behavior analytics, providing data to support operations, planning, and improvements.
  5. Least privilege access management, ensuring

5. Experience

SaaSOps changes — improves — your business’ overall experience with your cloud-based services. The impact is visible to your employees and your IT administration.

  • Automation simplifies tasks and reduces administrative, security, and other errors while improving your IT team’s ability to respond quickly to change and support requests.
  • Change management ensures decisions to alter services are known and documented and helps ensure you remain compliant with policies, industry standards, and regulations.
  • Managed Access and Rights reinforces company policies, maintains compliance, and enables employees to access the applications, services, and data needed for their jobs.

In Summary

As your use of cloud services grows, implementing SaaSOps solutions becomes an important management tool.  Beyond monitoring and managing costs, SaaSOps helps reduce management and administration errors, provides a better experience for IT teams and end users, and improves security. The incremental cost to deploy SaaSOps tools delivers savings while reducing risk.

Call To Action

Schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors or contact us to discuss how best you can support your remote and hybrid workers. The conversation is free, without obligation, and at your convenience.

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America. Starting his first business at age 12, Allen is a serial entrepreneur. He has launched strategic IT consulting, software, and service companies. An advocate for small and midsize businesses, Allen served on the board of the former Smaller Business Association of New England, local economic development committees, and industry advisory boards.

The State and Future of Remote Work

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As noted in a recent article published by American City Business Journals, the state and future of remote work are still up for debate.  Remote work and hybrid work arrangements continue to face resistance. Our reduced need for office space still impacts city centers and commercial real estate markets.  And yet, employees still want remote and hybrid work arrangements. The desire to have work-from-home options is strong enough that many employees will take pay cuts in exchange for the flexibility.

Some of the Data

Work from Home Research noted that paid full days worked out of office was about 27%, year to date, in 2023.  This represents a very slight decrease from recent months.

In February 2023:

  • 60% of employees worked full-time in the office
  • 28% of employees worked in a hybrid arrangement
  • 12% of employees worked remotely full time

40% of employees continue to work some or all of their time outside the office.

A recent study by Robert Half found:

  • 28% of job postings were advertised as remote
  • 32% of employees who work in the office at least one (1) day per week would take an average 18%  pay cut to work remotely full time

Data from the Federal Reserve indicates that:

  • From 2020 to 2021, during the surge in remote work, productivity jumped from 108.57 per hour to 115.3 per hour
  • In 2022, productivity dropped slightly as more employees returned to the office

Using the Data

Remote and hybrid work arrangements will likely continue as companies and employees work to find the right balance for the company and employees.  As small business leaders, we understand that remote work is an attractive feature of job postings, and 1/3 of employees would take a pay cut or change jobs to work remotely.

We need to manage our remote and hybrid work arrangements in ways that employees see as flexible and accommodating. 

In-person interactions with colleagues can improve morale and enhance company culture. It makes sense that we want most employees in the office, interacting face-to-face, at least some of the time.

Employees see most hybrid work arrangements as designed to meet the needs of the company, not employees.  Employees see incentives, such as free meals and other “perks”, as gimmicks to attract employees to the office without addressing employees’ needs.  We need to present hybrid work arrangements honestly in terms of company needs and priorities and those of the employees. If we provide a real balance of needs and priorities, employees will feel respected and heard. They will be more accepting of change.

The Role of Technology

We have no doubts about the power of technology to empower your employees to do their best work — in office or remotely.  Many small businesses scrambled to support remote work at the onset of the pandemic.  These solutions were often rushed and, as such, less efficient or effective than needed.  Too many of us, however, have not stepped back to assess, revise, and improve our IT support for remote and hybrid work.

We need support and technologies in place to ensure the long-term viability of remote and hybrid work.

Employees, when working remotely, want and need the same resources and abilities as when they are working in the office.  They want the same user experience regardless of where or how they work.  At the same time, we need to ensure our systems and data remain secure and protected.

When assessing your IT services, make sure you have the SPARC you need:

  • Security
  • Performance
  • Availability
  • Reliability
  • Cost

Leveraging cloud services, you can provide secure access to your systems and data, with a consistent user experience, at a reasonable cost.

Calls To Action

1. Read our recent eBook, Cloud Strategies for Small and Midsize Businesses. In this eBook, we: Set the stage by looking at how small and midsize businesses acquire and use technology and IT services; Explore the challenges we face moving into the cloud; and Map out four strategies for enhancing your use and expansion of cloud services.

2. Schedule time with one of our Cloud Advisors or contact us to discuss how best you can support your remote and hybrid workers. The conversation is free, without obligation, and at your convenience.

About the Author

Allen Falcon is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Global.  Allen co-founded Cumulus Global in 2006 to offer small businesses enterprise-grade email security and compliance using emerging cloud solutions. He has led the company’s growth into a managed cloud service provider with over 1,000 customers throughout North America. Starting his first business at age 12, Allen is a serial entrepreneur. He has launched strategic IT consulting, software, and service companies. An advocate for small and midsize businesses, Allen served on the board of the former Smaller Business Association of New England, local economic development committees, and industry advisory boards.

The QuickBooks Hosting Challenge

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QuickbooksQuickBooks is the leading accounting package for small business. And yet, many businesses cannot run QuickBooks Online, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version. Whether the online versions lack industry-specific features you need, or you have integrated third party tools/add-ons, staying with an on-premise version of QuickBooks remains the best solution for your business.

As you move to the cloud, hosting your QuickBooks Pro, Premier, or Enterprise system makes sense. You keep the version of QuickBooks you need and improve accessibility, reliability, security, and resiliency from system failures and disasters.

In general, we find two levels of common QuickBooks hosting options. Looking at these services more closely, we find these services often fail to meet basic needs without expensive upgrades.  Fortunately, we have a third option designed to deliver the business value you need and want.

Basic

Basic QuickBooks hosting services run between $27 and $30 per user per month, with you purchasing and providing the QuickBooks license key. These services start with 1 GB of storage with fees for added storage that add-up quickly. Adding storage you need for reports, exports, etc., can easily increase the cost to the $75-$90 per user per month range. More importantly, your instance of QuickBooks is running on shared servers and on a shared network. As such, you have greater risk for performance issues, security breaches, and outages. In this type of multi-tenant environment, the actions of other can impact your business. These services offer backup, usually once per day with a fixed retention period of 7, 14, 30, or 90 days, depending on the service.

Better

The better QuickBooks hosting services cost between $49 and $60 per user per month, with you purchasing and providing the QuickBooks license key.  These services also start with 1 GB of storage with fees that add up when you need more space. Typical fees quickly creep up to the $95 to $120 per user per month range.  The main difference is that these services generally run your version of QuickBooks on a dedicated server, but still run on a shared network. While this does reduce the chance of interference from other tenants, this model still has your service running in the same security envelope as other companies. You still have a risk. Like the basic services, you have a once per day backup with a fixed retention period that varies with each service provider.

Best

The best solution for hosting QuickBooks will use your license of QuickBooks in the following environment:

  • Dedicated server
  • Private network
  • A usable amount of storage included (100 GB or more)
  • Flexible backup schedules and retention plans
  • Easy access from desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones
  • Access to Excel (MS Office) in the hosted environment

We this type of setup, you are more secure, will have better performance, and greater reliability.

The good news is that we can build you this type of environment at a cost comparable to other services, and we can integrate your QuickBooks environment with your Office 365 or G Suite service.

If you are interested in learning more about QuickBooks hosting options, please contact us for a free Cloud Advisor session.

 

Moving to the Cloud: Provider Reliability

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Green_GaugeThis post is the third in a series addressing concerns organizations may have that prevent them from moving the cloud-based solutions.

One of the challenges in planning a move to the cloud remains the relative youth of the current industry.  While the concept of cloud computing is not new (tip your hat to Control Data in the 1980’s and their mainframe time-sharing service), most cloud computing services are relatively new.  Even services from long-standing, reliable vendors — like IBM and Dell — are relatively new ventures for these firms and have yet to be proven in a long-term market.

Organizations looking at any cloud service, be it SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS, must consider the reliability of the provider.  In doing so, it is the customer that must also understand the benchmarks being used by vendors when reporting their statistics.  Considerations include:

  • What is the availability of the service?  How well does the service provider meet their Service Level Agreement (SLA) benchmarks in terms of total downtime and/or service disruptions?
  • What is the reliability of the service?  How often does the service experience issues?  While most organizations tout availability, 6 disruptions lasting 10 minutes may have more impact on your operations than a single hour-long disruption.
  • Does the provider have performance benchmarks?  If so, how well does the provider meet the benchmarks?  In moving to the service provider, what expectations/needs will you have with respect to WiFi capacity, fixed network performance, and Internet capacity?   In many cases, the limiting factor on end-user performance is not the service provider or the Internet speed — it is the organization’s internal wired and wireless capacity.
  • What level of support do you expect?  Understanding how the provider delivers support — directly or through resellers/partners — is key to an organization’s long-term satisfaction with the service.
  • Does the vendor have the financial stability for the long-term?  With the number of start-ups in the cloud space, this factor may be the most difficult to ascertain.  Looking at the company’s financials, funding levels, and profitability can provide some insight.  Assessing whether the provider would be a good buy-out or merger target can also instill confidence that your provider will not go away unexpectedly.

With a modicum of due diligence, organizations can assess the reliability of cloud solution providers before making a commitment.  Reputable vendors will openly share their data and will not hesitate to discuss failures and how similar events will be prevented going forward.  And while, this type of discussion feels new, it is the same process CIOs and IT decision makers have been using for decades as they evaluate new technologies and vendors.  The players are new, but the process remains the same.

Next Post in the Series:  Privacy

Previous Post in the Series:  Moving to the Cloud: Cost Savings

 

Tuesday Take-Away: The True Role of the SLA

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As you look towards cloud solutions for more cost effective applications, infrastructure, or services, you are going to hear (and learn) a lot about Service Level Agreements, or SLAs.  Much of what you will hear is a big debate about the value of SLAs and what SLAs offer you, the customer.

Unfortunately, the some vendors are framing the value of their SLAs based on the compensation customers receive when the vendor fails to meet their service level commitments.  The best example of this attitude is Microsoft’s comparison of its cash payouts to Google’s SLA that provides free days of service.  Microsoft touts its cash refunds as a better response to failure.  Why any company would send out a marketing message that begins with “When we fail …” is beyond me.  But, that is a subject for another post someday.

That said, Microsoft and its customers that are comforted by the compensation, are totally missing the point of the SLA in the first place.  Any compensation for excessive downtime is irrelevant with respect to the actual cost and impact on your business.  And unless a vendor is failing miserably and often, the compensation itself is not going to change the vendor’s track record.

The true rule of the SLA is to communicate the vendor’s commitment to providing you with service that meets defined expectations for Performance, Availability, and Reliability (PAR).  The SLA should also communicate how the vendor defines and sets priorities for problems and how they will respond based on those priorities.  A good SLA will set expectations and define the method of measuring if those expectations are met.

Continuing with the Microsoft and Google example.  Microsoft sets an expectation that you will have downtime.  While the downtime is normally scheduled in advance, it may not be.  Google, in contrast, sets an expectation that you should have no downtime, ever.   The details follow.

Microsoft’s SLA is typical in that it excludes maintenance windows, periods of time the system will be unavailable for scheduled or emergency maintenance.  While Microsoft does not schedule these windows at a regular weekly or monthly time frame, they do promise to give you reasonable notice for maintenance windows.  The SLA, however, allows Microsoft to declare emergency maintenance windows with little or no maintenance.

In August 2010, Microsoft’s BPOS service had 6 emergency maintenance windows, totaling more than 10 hours, in response to customers losing connectivity to the service, along with 30 hours of scheduled maintenance windows.  In line with Microsoft’s SLA, customers experienced more than 40 hours of downtime that month, which is within the boundaries of the SLA and its expectations.  On August 17, 2011, Microsoft experienced a data center failure that resulted in loss of Exchange access for its Office365 customers in North America for as long a five hours.  The system was down for 90 minutes before Microsoft acknowledged this as an outage.

Google’s SLA sets and expectation for system availability 24x7x365, with no scheduled downtime for maintenance and no emergency maintenance windows.

The difference in SLAs sets a very different expectation and makes a statement about how each vendor builds, manages, and provides the services you pay for.

When comparing SLAs, understand the role of maintenance windows and other “exceptions” that give the vendor an out.  Also, look at the following.

  • Definitions for critical, important, normal, and low priority issues
  • Initial response times for issues based on priority level
  • Target time to repair for issues based on priority level
  • Methods of communicating system status and health
  • Methods of informing customers of issues and actions/results

Remember, if you need to use the compensation clause, your vendor has already failed.

 

 

 

Webcasts

Next Normal: Apps & Servers

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(3/16/2021) – COVID-19 and the events of the past 10 months have, and continue, to change the way we run our businesses. Explore how your team accesses the applications, systems, and data they need to succeed, whether in the office or working remotely.

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