software as a service
3. You can't afford to keep
your data centre out of sight
and out of mind
Make sure your supplier is equipped with round-the-clock video and audio monitoring.
such as financial services,
healthcare, medical and defence.
Here, business leaders must comply
with the likes of the Payment Card
Industry (PCI) and Data Security
Standards (DSS) regulations, the
UK Data Protection Act (DPA),
ISO 27000 series, Sarbanes-Oxley
(SOX) and the Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act
(HIPAA), to name just a few. The
crucial consideration here is that
not all data centre providers will
be compliant with all regulations.
It's the responsibility of business
and IT leaders to ensure that these
measures are in place.
The best advice when choosing
your data centre is to make sure
your supplier uses compliance ready
hardware and software with advanced
safety measures, high-bit encryption
and the latest security certificates, as
well as being equipped with roundthe-clock video and audio monitoring.
However, be prepared to pay a
premium for higher levels of security
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and compliance. For example,
Parker Software's ProspectAgent
uses Microsoft Azure, a service that
offers geo-redundant hosting – if a
server experiences hardware failure,
a power outage or even a natural
disaster, service is instantly moved to
a geographically redundant location
anywhere in the world, thereby
maintaining provision and uptime.
Despite this, the best laid plans
of mice and men often go awry.
In times when the service does
experience problems – for example
during an extended Distributed
Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in
the financial sector – customers are
given a personal account manager
and a dedicated phoneline. This is
indispensable when, as a business,
you're firefighting an influx of inbound
calls from irate customers demanding
to get back online immediately. It is
during times like these that being
able to tell your customers that you've
mitigated and managed the problem
is invaluable.
The evolution of data centres has
certainly afforded businesses lots of
flexibility and operational efficiency
improvements, but this doesn't mean
that you can leave your data centre
out of sight and out of mind. Most
service level agreements (SLAs)
make it compulsory that the SaaS
provider maintains responsibility
for the continued maintenance and
updates of software, meaning that
the buck stops there and not with the
data centre.
As a result, it's crucial that you
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