A new buzz word heard more and more in IT communities is SaaS – which stands for “Software as a Service”.   What is SaaS?  The best known application which fits a SaaS model is Salesforce.com, which provides extensive contract and account tracking for sales professionals using a web based approach, with all the data stored by Salesforce.com.   Each company using this application pays a subscription fee per user, and can access the data from anywhere and at any time, as long as an Internet connection is present.

Software-as-a-service takes the onus for upgrades, data and server maintenance, installation etc off of the end customer and makes it part of the value the company receives from the software vendor.

The data generated by the end users is said to live “in the cloud”, which refers to a data center or hosting facility managed by the SaaS vendor.  This means it is consolidated and all accessible from one place, instead of being resident in partial form in multiple PC hard drives across the network.

Given the success of Salesforce.com, many other SaaS model companies are popping up with great value propositions and solid offerings. Some of these are security-as-a service offerings which provide added protection for enterprises that don’t want to maintain these applications on site.   Still others, such as startup HealthHiway which focuses on hospital patient data and billing are adding value by managing business critical, data intensive functions that used to be managed via on premise server banks and resident applications.

What does this mean for your network?  First of all, a fast WAN connection so that data can be retrieved quickly is going to become essential in the coming years.  This means your “pipe” leading into each enterprise building must be capable of handling lots of data (cat 5e or better is recommended), and your relationship with your service provider will be mission critical.   Be sure to choose a package and provider who can handle ever growing traffic needs.

Last but not least, this means that your need for new servers and personnel to maintain those servers will be reduced by the extent you choose to embrace the new SaaS models for your business.   This will allow you to focus on the business, and less on maintenance intensive activities.

If your infrastructure is not up to the SaaS challenge, now is the time to call professional structured cabling installers to make sure you can take advantage of this exciting, new trend.

If you liked this article, tell all your friends about it. They’ll thank you for it. If you have a blog or website, you can link to it or even post it to your own site (don’t forget to mention our Network Cabling website as the original source).

Cloud computing and storage is a rapidly growing trend in the IT world – and its advantages are many.  Storing company data in the cloud means the data is safe in the event of a local disaster or fire, eliminates the needs for local power-hungry and maintenance intensive servers, and is in keeping with the current trends towards outsourcing.

Yet every business needs to consider whether using the cloud is right for their unique needs – as cloud computing is not going to be cost-effective for everyone at this stage.

First of all, any business using cloud based information storage for mission critical material needs to make sure that the data is backed up in multiple places.  If a bomb hits Denver, Colorado and that is where your data is stored, this doesn’t pose a problem if you have redundant storage in a data center in New York, for example.

Secondly, if instant retrieval of data is required – having a solid WAN connection using a reputable provider with a good SLA (service level agreement) is essential.  Otherwise, information retrieval could be slow and spotty.

If security is a concern, there are highly secure facilities available for storage.  However, many security conscious companies prefer to have their data directly under their thumb – stored locally with tight controls such as biometric requirements to allow access.

If your company is large with high data storage requirements, creating a data center tailored to your unique needs and managed by direct employees simply makes sense.  This can then be viewed as a “private cloud” – accessible to only those in your enterprise. But if your company is small, purchasing, maintaining and upgrading servers may be a bigger headache than moving to the cloud.

One of the greatest benefits of the cloud is the use and storage of applications to be used across your entire business.  This frees your employees and/or internal IT staff from the endless cycle of bug fixes and upgrades that used to be required for PC resident applications, and allows them to do more productive, revenue producing work.

Having each entire hard drive or computing capability in the cloud also frees individual users from having to run virus checkers, antispyware checkers and other utilities that can cost them productive work time or severely compromise their systems if not performed in a timely manner.

Overall, the cloud represents a paradigm shift from yesterday’s thinking that all equipment had to be resident at the customer’s site.   It may make many think that the importance of having a solid company IT backbone and infrastructure is lessened, but in fact, the opposite is true.  In order to use remotely stored data and applications most efficiently, the basics for a great IT infrastructure have to be in place.  If you need to upgrade your internal wiring, routers, or local IT architecture – call structured wiring installers to help you create a winning strategy for your current and future needs.

If you liked this article, tell all your friends about it. They’ll thank you for it. If you have a blog or website, you can link to it or even post it to your own site (don’t forget to mention our Network Cabling website as the original source).