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Contents 
Introduction
Gaining traction
Risking it all
Picking your cards
The key that fits
Case study: WebCentral |
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How secure will my information be? Will staff be able to access data at all times? Will I experience any downtime? And how easily will it be to integrate my hosted solution with key legacy systems and other IT investments I already have, or want to maintain in-house? These are the questions Frost & Sullivan's Fadaghi says he hears time and time.
These fears, teamed with a lack of well-developed industry-specific solutions, and the often exorbitant long-term cost, and inexperience with SLAs, have made it easy for make companies to push the hosted proposal to the side.
Hosted solutions provider Micronet Systems Australia specialises in the hosting of their own inventory management and financial products. Director Drew Arthur says even as a host, his company has experienced the effects of a poor hosted solution. "We had two unsuitable hosted partners looking after our financial and point-of-sales applications, both critical to our business, who could not get their head around the complexity of our reliance on them as a hosting partner," Arthur says.
"It was not until the third partnership that we found someone who understood that if you lose data it can cost you, or if you suffer downtime it can be even worse. Finding this perfect marriage really was a matter of trial and error, but we eventually worked out a perfect agreement."
Arthur says security and privacy are at the top of Micronet customers' concerns. Most of these fears, he says, have come from negative experiences with previous hosts. "Some data-centres just don't understand the importance of having available data. You must make sure that it is clearly stated in your SLA that you want a certain level of uptime. There are some bad perpetrators out there but there are also plenty of hosts who do the right thing -- it is not hard to achieve," he says.
Salesforce.com vice president Doug Farber says this is the way the hosted industry tends to work in general. Most security concerns tend to be emotional, political, and only occasionally technical, he says. "But they are very real. We had to spend well more than AU$150 million in infrastructure security [to win the confidence of some clients]," Farber says. "We have to do security audits with the banks and financial institutions that use us to prove we are secure and private. The problem is 95 percent of the businesses in the world using hosted solutions can't afford that extra monitoring. That is why you have a testimonial base, so if you can't afford the monitoring, then you can hear from others how well a host's security works."
"We encourage people to do as many reference calls as they can before taking up a hosted solution for this very reason. If a vendor cannot come up with three, four, or five viable companies that are using them for the areas you want to host, then you should think twice about going on board with them. There are a lot of claims about what people can and can't do out there and buyers have to be dubious and only settle when they have a degree of comfort and assurance."
6%
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