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01 Oct 2009
IT suppliers are not immune from events happening across the global economy and can fail just like any other company.
I think the best way you can protect yourself from IT suppliers going bust is by disintegrating the IT services supply chain. Do not host your software with the same people that build it, such as Salesforce.com or Google, since all your eggs are then in one basket.
Buy software from one provider, but have a direct relationship with the host. Some of our customers are starting to do this. They host one thing with us, and back up to a third-party host, which is cheap to do.
Managing the backup and hosting process might be a new way that resellers can differentiate their offering or add value to the supply chain as more businesses look to protect their data as they move to a cloud model. Ensuring easy data migration between cloud providers is paramount.
By not being tied to one provider, a business can easily migrate to another host. Software providers cannot compete in today's commoditised market, and should stick to their strengths. This also applies to migrations; some companies specialise in the migration itself but have no interest in selling software or hosting.
Disintegrating the supply chain also makes migration to a new cloud provider or managed host easy since you just work with the software supplier to migrate to the new host.
Most managed hosting providers are now offering cloud-like services that offer the same economies of scale that is making hosting in the cloud popular.
Outsourcing email and data to a cloud-based provider raises issues around data location policies and acceptable service level agreements (SLAs).
With cloud-based outsourcing, the location is often outside the UK and thus in breach of data protection laws that saying you cannot move information across international boundaries.
Furthermore, if you do need to store documents, do it yourself rather than trusting some nebulous non-geographically-specific organisation to do it.
Simply rent a server from a UK-based company that has solid SLAs. You need not pay more.
Kate Craig-Wood is co-founder and managing director at managed hosting provider Memset
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