SaaS (News 
- Alert) is the new black.
When choosing whether to replace depreciated equipment or go to an “as-a-service” provider, businesses are now choosing the latter alternative. Traditional vendors have become too involved for businesses, causing them to turn to SaaS. In fact, the fear of as-a-service is subsiding completely, with companies looking to solve more and more problems with it.
Although many marketing, HR and sales departments have already moved to SaaS, IT has been slower to join the migration. But, in 2016, we’ll see more IT departments move to SaaS and other as-a-Service offerings, rather than simply assisting other departments’ moves.
Many view IT as a service, and larger companies have incorporated service-now IT into their structures but, now, all types and sizes of companies are adopting this structure. For many companies, disaster recovery will represent the first move into the service-now sphere. Because most companies don’t want to invest in the amount of capital that’s required to solve for disaster recovery well, they will leverage DRaaS providers to take care of it.
A changing data center landscape
Once companies move their major applications to SaaS, you may think there’s no point of maintaining a data center. But, many important apps that haven’t moved to SaaS still need to be managed and maintained. Companies can hire cloud providers with a focus on IT resiliency to run those apps and take the worry off their own shoulders.
Providers, like Bluelock and others, can jump in at this point to host and protect applications while IT (or the software provider) modernizes them so they can eventually convert to SaaS.
A new era of accountability in the “always-on” business
We’ve seen CIOs fired for data breaches; they will now take the blame for downtime and outages, too. Corporate apps have managed to dodge scrutiny, but social media will soon start exposing more problems and add accountability to this area.
For example, if a plane doesn’t take off when it’s supposed to, passengers will often complain about the airline on social media. Likewise, if someone takes their car into the auto shop to be fixed and the part isn’t there yet, they’re likely to let their frustration out on the Web. These are just a few examples of how social media can bring attention to dependencies on applications to run critical business operations. All companies want to make sure the service they’re offering goes uninterrupted to keep customers happy and competition off their tail, and CIOs will feel that pressure.
More thought build, buy or partner
Should you hire in-house expertise or outsource your needs to an as-a-service provider? More companies are now opting for the as-a-service option. Because recruiting and keeping great IT talent continues to be a struggle for most companies, they will feel even more pressure to put the talent they do have to work on innovation and growth initiatives, rather than low-priority but business-critical essentials like disaster recovery.
Companies recognize that disaster recovery takes a tremendous amount of expertise, time and money, so it will be a top outsourcing initiative in 2016.
Implementation of secure and customized DR plan
Although traditional problems (e.g., tornados and floods) are still a threat, security incidents like outside attacks and malicious employees are creating broader demand for IT resiliency. Companies recognize the risk of data breaches, presenting the need for a third party to provide security and disaster recovery in an integrated fashion.
Hackers can attack an organization’s disaster recovery data center or backup facility because, due to lack of security, they can get the desired information much more easily than through the production site. This is one of the most frequently missed flaws of organizations: Lack of security surrounding the DR plan. Your disaster recovery site must be as secure as the production site, or your organization runs the risk of security breaches.
In 2016, more organizations will move away from just “checking” the DR box and implement plans that ensure data is secure both on the production site and on the recovery site. This overall adoption will become mainstream as CIOs are held responsible for complete business resiliency.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson
