SaaS Risk Reduction Series

My post titled "What is your Cloud Strategy?", where I spoke about the importance of having diversification and redundancy baked into the cloud strategy of any small business, kicked off criticisms from my fellow Cloud Avenue Editors, Zoli and Ben. They did not agree with my argument about not keeping all the eggs in the same basket. In fact, Ben even claimed that there can only be one right approach, either his approach or mine. The main criticisms of Zoli and Ben can be summarized as follows

Small Businesses wants the convenience of having all the apps with a single vendor
They lack the IT department, like enterprises, and hence they cannot afford to have diversification baked into their cloud strategy

These are valid points and I, in fact, agree with these points to a certain degree. But, unlike what Ben thinks, I feel that there can be more than one approach to the issue and I would like to offer the rationale behind my approach. My framework is totally different from the framework under which Zoli and Ben operate. As a recovering System Admin, I tend to prepare a business to cover for the worst case scenarios and Zoli & Ben, with their background from the business side of things, tend to think from the point of view of convenience and cost savings. In fact, both these approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages.

In this series, I will put forward my thoughts on the cloud strategy for small businesses by offering deeper insights into the topic than what I offered in my previous post. I will write about different factors that could play a role in reducing the risks for small businesses as they move from the traditional desktop world to SaaS world. I also hope that Zoli and Ben will write about it from time to time. In the end, small businesses can consider the pros and cons of both the approaches and develop their cloud strategy based on a better understanding of the subject. I will be writing multiple posts in this series over a period of few weeks (months?) and I hope that this series achieves its purpose when it is finally done. Feel free to offer your thoughts in the comments section of the posts and it will help tweak my own approach to better suit the reality in the SaaS world.