SaaS Making Way For Storage As A Service

As organisations look at combating the spiralling costs of owning licensed software and subsequent upgrades, the Software as a Service (SaaS) model will accrue huge benefits for companies shifting from capital expenditure to operational expenditure. The SaaS model will enable customers to have a computing environment that scales up or down as per demand, with a seamlessness and continuity that minimises or eliminates disruption for end users.

Within the APAC region, India is the best example of a country that’s reinventing itself by adopting SaaS. Seamless collaboration, ease of implementation and management are acting as key drivers for SaaS adoption in the country. According to a report from Springboard Research, the SaaS market in India is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 77% from 2006 to 2010, to reach $165 million by 2010.

The SaaS model has now made way for Storage as a Service in India, and storage vendors are keen to follow the SaaS model for their SME and large customers. EMC is now making a move into this segment and plans to tap the immense potential of the SMB segment in India.

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SMBs biggest beneficiaries

Many SMBs fail to derive the true benefits of IT due to lack of resources and expertise. It is for this reason that SMBs today are exploring various SaaS options that cost less and are run by experts. According to Kiran Datar, managing director, WebEx Communications, “The absence of legacy software in India gives SMBs the freedom to look at SaaS as an option. Cost-effectiveness, freedom from support and upgrades as well as security are very relevant factors that will influence acceptance.”

With SaaS, a vendor or service provider owns, hosts, manages and updates the software so that customers need not implement or manage software applications themselves, but can rely on experts to do it for them. Customers pay for SaaS on a subscription or per-use basis, which simplifies budget planning, reduces upfront costs, makes payments more predictable and lowers total cost of ownership. This allows SMBs to eliminate many of the overhead IT expenses and operational concerns commonly associated with traditional software.

Storage as a Service picking up

The voluminous growth of data has compelled enterprises to think seriously about their storage infrastructure. Data storage and availability, growing maintenance costs and security are evolving as major IT headaches for SMBs.

“Setting up a solid backup and recovery infrastructure tends to be not only expensive, but also a daunting and time consuming task for SMBs. Often IT teams don’t realise that there is a problem with their data protection solution until they try to restore data from tape backups or archives, only to learn that the data is corrupt, unavailable, or unusable. That is why SaaS backup and disaster recovery offerings can be an ideal solution,” says Ajay Verma, director, Channel and Alliances, Symantec India.

Symantec recently released a new online service platform called ‘Symantec Protection Network’ to deliver protection to SMBs by boosting their IT infrastructure via a wide range of web-delivered services. Symantec is also gearing up to deliver online backup as a service specifically designed for SMBs later this year.

Despite the numerous benefits, some SMBs are still hesitant to make the move to SaaS applications. Explains Hilal Isar Khan, head IT, Honda Siel, “SMBs require the same levels of service reliability and data security as their enterprise counterparts, but that isn’t easily achievable due to the costs and time associated with managing assorted IT elements. Storage infrastructure of any organisation takes a major chunk of IT investment. So if the vendors are able to provide a model based on Software as a Service, not only SMBs but also large enterprises will benefit from it.”