For many small businesses, the lure of running their applications on a platform such as Google Apps is tempting. Not having to hire expensive IT help and low monthly costs allow a business owner the freedom to concentrate on other important business needs.
But with convenience, there is risks, as some users experienced this past week. Enduring an 8 - 12 hour GMail downtime, left a lot of users out of business.
While the Internet is quickly becoming the fabric of our lives, for a business owner it is still in it's infancy for hosting applications. It may be reassuring that big companies with names like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are providing key online applications services such as email, calendars, instant messaging, and office applications online and work very well. The real risk is not understanding their Terms of Service, data security and effects of downtime to your business.
How Important Is Your Data?
Using online applications has many benefits, one of them is access to your data and communication services from anywhere. While this may seem like a great feature, can you trust the Provider of the service with security, data integrity, and privacy of employee communications?
How many times has an employee accidentally deleted data? Can it be restored in a timely fashion and what is the cost to have the data restored? How much control will have you while you are at the mercy of the provider to react quickly.
While Instant Messaging provides text based real time communications, what assurances do you have with employee privacy and company confidential information that could be logged and protected from eavesdropping?
Downtime
Often overlooked with Online services is downtime. How many important messages are in your mailbox? As was the case with Google GMail outage, users were left in the dark with status updates since Google had no other provision in place for their Premier paying customers.
This kind of downtown can be critical for a small business. Leaving important messages on the server without an offline backup available, could leave you without information while trying to run the business during the outage.
SLA Agreements
In the I.T. world, 98% uptime is considered highly acceptable. What does that really mean? With Google's outage of 12 hours, if they have no other outages for the month, they will meet their SLA (Service Level Agreement) and be in compliance with the Terms Of Service (TOS), which is 98% uptime.
For a business owner, what is the cost of a 12 hour outage?
Your Responsibility
When seeking to outsource applications to Application Service Providers (ASP), businesses need to consider many possibilities. Service Level Agreements, communication privacy, data integrity and downtime are among the critical decisions that you should be aware of and what risks are involved.
While costs is usually the final reason to go with an ASP provider, it should be one aspect of the equation in the decision making process.
With running I.T inhouse, you have more control over many things compared to an ASP solution.But it is not without it's own set of problems. Finding good Technical support is the key that will eventually minimize those problems and allow you to have more control over cost, planning and disaster recovery.
Many advancements have been made with Online Application Services that will only get better with time. Unfortunately as Technology progresses, the learning curve for a small business owner becomes steeper and more difficult to ask the proper questions when evaluating companies that provide the services
A small business owner best friend in asking the proper questions, could still be that same person you trust now, when it comes to outsourcing your I.T. needs.
Comments on What Small Businesses Can Learn From Google Apps Recent Troubles
Dave @ 10:52 am
How can an average under-1000-employee company find better IT on par with Google's IT people? You will pay much more than subscribing to Google. Once the service becomes more solid and security is proven, the choice will be irresistible. (I use Google as an example-many companies are in this online app field.)
If your job today involves managing various email and web servers and user PCs, you really need to build up some other skills. Not all IT will go away, but a lot of the common infrastructure will.
Dave, you hit the nail on the head "Once the service becomes more solid and security is proven"
If a business fully understands the risks and has a plan in place, when outages occurs, then using ASP providers makes sense. Core business applications such as email are critical to many businesses and an outage with no redundancy or a better notification system in place is going to scare away using the ASP model for many business that need it the most