CIO Priorities 4: SaaS

CIO Priority 4:

Move to Software as a Service.

Software as a Service, where business software is provided over the public internet rather than from servers that sit in a private data centre somewhere has actually been around for quite a long time now. The first big product, the CRM system SalesForce started to get deployed in large organisations in the 2000s. Big deployments of Google’s G-Suite services were happening from around 2009. These days most big software vendors have a cloud-based SaaS offer.

And yet for many organisations a move to these Cloud-based services is still a new thing. The barriers to accepting SaaS are still the same – mostly issues of perceptions of control. What if it goes wrong? What if they steal our data? What will I tell people I’m doing if it’s not available?

The argument I used with the Chairman and owner of the first company that I took into SaaS back in 2009 remains the same. Your organisations trusts its actual money to a Cloud service that is run by a bunch of people who repeatedly have shown themselves to be utterly disreputable and with regularly failing systems (the banks). You don’t store all of the businesses money under a mattress in the CFO’s office. Why are you worried about where your email sits?

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I’ve recently launched Stamp London’s first physical product – a set of playing cards called CIO Priorities. You can find out more about them here, and order a set for yourself here (or simply download the PDF and print them out).