eProcurement In The Cloud As Saas Or On-premises

To Host or Not Host – That is the question.

When considering a new deployment of an eProcurement system which way shoud you jump ? Self-host or SaaS outsource ?

As we are a software company that provides Cloud services for our purchasing software solution we often get asked if the client can host it themselves – we always say yes it’s certainly possible but we always ask why ?

We are supposed to be a Software As A Service (SaaS) provider hence us hosting it for you.

Here at Eyvo we have proven systems, procedures and protocols in place which allow us to spin up a new system within 10 minutes where we take care of all the security, data integrity, bandwidth, backup, disaster recovery and antivirus network issues together with all application updates and operating system patches ; So we always ask the client why would they want to do all this themselves – take on the responsibility and the potential liability.

The typical answer we get back from our client is simply security ; they are worried about the data getting into the wrong hands or being hacked and information being stolen from them and of course we understand that, however, unless the client is a military installation or ordering proprietary materials we see no really good reason for this response.

We tend to list the advantages and disadvantages for each client on a case-by-case basis ; we like to understand the businesses that we are licensing our system too as that way we can give you the best advice based on our larger experience and one of our experiences is of course in hosting our own software.

In the hundreds of systems that we have deployed around the world, only in a handful of cases have we been required to have an on-premises installation ; generally the client have made good business cases for it and of course we have allowed it. We expect the client to host the solution in a professional environment with professional frontline support staff and they have to look after the wider infrastructure and technology that supports the application. All we use is Microsoft based software that our system relies on – typically Windows Serer, IIS, SQLServer, SMTP etc) so we have no real reason to stop you hosting it yourself other than the practical one – for example if you take a customized solution from us and wish to host it yourself then it makes it more complicated for us to make system adjustments and get updates to you if we are unable to access the solution ; so the support can be a bit of an issue unless we are allowed access into the server which given the clients predisposition for security we would be most unlikely to get. This situation tends to come up most in government installations where the client is operating behind a federal or State firewall and simply will not open up any access to outside vendors.

In general, purchasing software solutions do not store sensitive information. The most sensitive information we might hold would be application usernames, passwords and credit card information for example if we holding the company’s purchase card data but that we encrypt using three different methodologies and we are also behind our own Cisco firewall plus we of course use use SSL encryption so in terms of our infrastructure it’s a secure as anyone can make it and since the system was first deployed we have never been breached. Our solution is running at Rackspace who are a fully SAS 70 Type I and II certified commercial hosting company that have thousands of clients all over the world. We use them because we get great infrastructure support from them – after all we are experts at our eProcurement application not DDOS attacks etc.

So if you are thinking about hosting the solution yourself, yes its possible but is it really desirable for you ?

Please let us know your thoughts – either on this blog or contact us privately today to discuss your concerns.