Expert: Gmail outages shouldn't turn you off SaaS

In spite of a recent high-profile service outage, Gmail maintains good uptime, says Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. The real challenge for software as a service (SaaS) providers like Google will be to provide an offline mode so users can be productive during an outage.

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What are the upsides to SaaS-based e-mail that shouldn't be forgotten amidst the Gmail incident?

If you look at the total cost, you can do hosted a lot cheaper than on-premise. If you look at just the general dollar outlays, for a very large organization, it'll at first seem cheaper to do it in-house. But then you have to look at the opportunity cost. You can [take] IT staff and put them on something that is more value-added [than e-mail maintenance]. You can take one off managing spam or two IT administrators managing e-mail servers and put them on integration efforts with a customer service environment as an example. There's a lot of advantages of going hosted because you can redeploy people to things that are going to provide more value to your company.

But even knowing that, we see so many organizations still on-premise. So what gives?

It's a variety of things. There's still this perception that on-premise is cheaper than hosted. Sometimes that true, but very often it's not. There are also concerns about the security of the data. People are afraid that if their e-mail stores are in some remote data center, there could be a compromise of the data. The stories about Google mail going down also put people on hold. They'll say, "Well, we can't afford to be an hour without e-mail." And the problems may be no worse with Google mail than it would be with an on-premise e-mail, but again Google gets a lot more press and attention. Hosted e-mail could have a better service record than on-premise, but you just don't hear about it. All people focus on are the negatives.

When people ask you about the security question of SaaS versus on-premise, what is your response?

Hosted providers have very robust security. I visited Zantaz [which does hosted e-mail archives] a year and a half ago. They walked me through their facility. You had to walk through four access doors and you needed two-factor identification. They have video cameras with constant surveillance. There are all kinds of security that you typically don't find in most organizations. So my advice is look at your own security, and look at theirs, and you'd probably find they have better security than you do.