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FEATURE: SAAS
Many companies are now
using a Software-as-a-
Service (SaaS) model where
the software is licensed on
a subscription basis and is
centrally hosted. Intelligent
CIO spoke to Ken Ringdahl
(VP, Global Alliances
Architecture, Veeam) and
Michael Cade (Senior Global
Technologist, Veeam) about
the benefits of using a SaaS
product and the challenges
you can expect.
Do you use any other ‘as-a-Service’ products,
such as Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-
as-a-Service?
KR: Certainly with Infrastructure-as-a-Service, we have solutions
today that support many in the public clouds and some of the
Platform-as-a-Services, such as data bases. They’re in a roadmap
for us where we’re looking at that. When you look at the Veeam
customer base, we’ve added physical, cloud and SaaS support.
As we look at adopting paths and other services, we look at our
typical customers’ adoption map.
We are looking at cloud-native products, but when we look at the
core product that we have, it’s more the on-pre customer that is
going to the cloud. It all goes with our customer, how they’ve
matured and progressed into the public clouds and other services.
What do you think are the main challenges
regarding SaaS?
MC: From a security point of view, depending on the size of the
W
What are the benefits you
have experienced from using a
SaaS product?
KR: What we’re hearing from virtually all
customers is Office 365 and we’re coming
up to our fourth version of that product.
The thing we hear most commonly from
customers is that they’re beginning to
become much more aware of their ownership
of data and the fact that they own the
data, even though it’s a hosting service. So,
customers are becoming much more aware
of the capabilities and the protection they get
built in from any SaaS service.
We’ve got a really strong relationship with
Microsoft. They’re now becoming much
more open about it and there’s a much
greater awareness, so it’s much easier for us
to come together with Microsoft.
Making it
simple with
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INTELLIGENTCIO
business, for the attack footprint for any cybersecurity, if you’re
running your own exchange farm on premises, you’re in control of all
the firewall and networking and all the access permissions to get into
that environment. Whereas, if you offload that to the public cloud
or the SaaS provider, within their interests they have the most secure
environment. Now the security doesn’t just go away, there’s still the
threat of someone getting into that system, but it is a lot easier to
pay someone that is purely just looking after their SaaS environment
and to keep that platform as secure as possible. So, you’re offloading
that security and risk from the on-premises solution.
A challenge that we’re seeing two to three years on is, if you have
data loss within Office 365, Microsoft keep a retention of data but
it’s not absolute. That is why you need data protection on that
SaaS. People are under the impression that their data is secure
and protected, whereas they’re only protected so much. Therefore,
education is another challenge. We’re speaking to a lot of our
prospective customers and we like to educate them that you should
still look at your backup of your SaaS work.
What industries or verticals would you say are
currently using SaaS?
MC: I think everyone is using it. The approach of getting rid of
Exchange on premises and not having to worry about patching,
infrastructure, scalability, uptime availability and just offloading
SaaS
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