Software as a Service Trust and Confidence
Buyer beware! Careful, unstable application ahead! Your data is at Risk! These are a few of the labels that should be visible on the front page of many Software as a Service offerings today.
Just recently I heard a story about an online software company that made a system administration mistake and their users information just vanished into thin air. The company apologized to their customers and blamed it on the fact they were still in beta. No recovery, no data, no nothing - just an “oops”. Imagine if that was you. Imagine if your company lost several days of your CRM data or months of your accounting records because your Software as a Service vendor didn’t really know how to run the back end systems?
We have a strange phenomena in business today. We tend to blindly trust just about any web site. And if that web site has official looking features like secured payments through PayPal or a Hacker Free label, we tend to trust it even more. But what about the reality of today’s Software as a Service. In a matter of minutes almost any developer can take an open source project and then host it on a $10/month internet account. They can immediately sign up for PayPal and get a hacker free certification in a matter of minutes. The developer can create a fancy sign up page and start to take your money. You begin to put your valuable customer data into the online service with a hope that the software vendor/consultant knows how to keep it safe and keep the application up and running. But as more stories of data loss and application problems surface, it’s up to the buyer to start to put pressure back onto the SaaS providers to ensure that we increase the trust and confidence of online applications.
Before you trust a SaaS provider and put your confidence in their system, you need to ask some questions. You need to know if the application is going to be available, if your data is going to be safe and what the company is doing to make sure everything stays up and running. On the flip side, many SaaS providers are going above and beyond. They just don’t tell their customers. Therefore to be proactive, I suggest that every SaaS provider have a simple web page that answers these questions to help increase the confidence and trust in their applications:
1. Is there built in redundancy for the application and the infrastructure so that it is going to be available when I need to use it?
2. How is my data kept safe and secure from other users or hackers on the internet?
3. If there is a failure, are you prepared to handle it quickly and is my data recoverable? How often do you backup my data?
4. Do you monitor the system & the application on a continuous basis? If there is a problem, who is watching the system and how long until they will be able to fix it?
5. Do you keep the system up to date with security patches & fixes on a regular basis?
If the SaaS application is running on a Morph AppSpace, all of these questions are already answered for you. Every application running in a Morph AppSpace is already running on an enterprise quality infrastructure that has taken all 5 of these questions into consideration. Here is a rundown on how we would answer the questions for our our customers using Morph AppSpace subscriptions to run their offerings:
1. Is the application going to be available when I need to use it?
There are several levels of redundancy for every application running within a Morph AppSpace. This means that even in the event of a failure, there are redundant systems in place to help reduce the risk of an application being unavailable. This is an expensive implementation because it means that you must have at least two of everything and honestly most small ISVs don’t bother and try to play the odds. But Morph Labs believes that availability and integrity are two of the most important aspects of running any web application. When you look at the details of the Morph AppSpace environment, the systems that direct the traffic to the individual applications are called Load Balancers and these are redundant. The applications themselves are redundant with at least two copies of the application running at any given time, and these copies are running in different computers to lessen the risk even more. And finally, the database servers are replicated to provide another level of availability to the application just in case something happens to the master database.
2. How is my data kept safe and secure from other users or hackers on the internet?
Data is the lifeblood of every interactive application. When your data is involved, it becomes even more important to ensure its security. All data stored within a Morph AppSpace is completely private from all other applications that are running in our environment. This means that your data won’t be accidentally co-mingled with another one of our Morph AppSpace customers. With regards to hackers, we protect our database layer in several ways starting with an architecture that doesn’t expose the database directly to the Internet. Then we make sure our systems are up to date with the latest patches and security fixes. Next, we implement security features such as an intrusion detection system, firewalls and continuous auditing to ensure only proper access to the servers.
3. If there is a failure, are you prepared to handle it quickly and is my data recoverable?
Morph started out with the premiss that bad things happen every day in the infrastructure. To ensure that we limit the exposure of our customers and our customers customers, we have implemented safeguards and automated repair systems to react the moment a problem takes place. We have a self-repair system that can automatically fixes several common issues. We also have architected our fail over systems to automatically engage when there is a hiccup. When it comes to data and databases, we keep a replicated copy of the database and make it seamless for the application if there is a failure of the main system. And lastly, we backup the users data every minute of every day. This means that the window of loss on a total failure is very small.
4. Do you monitor the system & the application on a continuous basis?
Morph has automated the monitoring of the entire infrastructure to ensure that each point is working at its best. This is no small feat. We have over 800 different points being monitored every minute of every day. When one of the monitoring points has a warning or a failure, the Morph System Administrators are notified. They then spring into action and fix the problem as quickly as possible. Most issues are resolved while in the warning state and there is no visible impact to our customers applications. You only get this type of service when there are dedicated humans continuously watching and managing the entire system.
5. Do you keep the system up to date with security patches & fixes on a regular basis?
The Morph System Administrators keep the entire infrastructure up to date and optimized for web application delivery. This is a skill set that many developers do not have, yet at Morph we are fortunate to have an entire team dedicated to keeping the systems alive and well every day. SaaS providers using Morph AppSpace subscriptions can rest assured that they have a team of experts working on their behalf.
As a customer of a SaaS application, if you see the “Powered by Morph AppSpace” badge, you know you can have an increased level of confidence and trust. And for ISVs looking to get out of the business of system administration, you can easily move existing Rails, Java and Grails applications to a Morph AppSpace subscription starting at only $1/day. Imagine that. An entire IT department running your application environment for you at less than the cost of a daily cup of coffee!
MySQL available and Java/Grails go live
Today Morph Labs updated the Morph AppSpace Platform as a Service with some new key features. The first two features I'll talk about are the top two desired features from our user base. You asked for them so we are providing them. First up is MySQL support and secondly are scheduled tasks.
On the database front we have added MySQL as an option for your application. You can now use MySQL in both your developer account as well as in your production account. Just as with PostgreSQL, your MySQL database is private just to you, your data is easily accessible via our web based DB console and all of your information is backed up automatically.
Many of you needed to have the ability to schedule tasks to run automatically for your application requirements. We created a new job scheduling function that allows you to setup and run a RAKE task whenever you want to. You can run the task once a day or once a minute. It's all up to you.
On the development language front, our Java version is now fully available as paid service. This means that you can take your Java web application or your Grails application and run it in a world class environment that can scale with the click of a button. If you have a Java web application that can run against Tomcat, then it will work within our Jetty based environment. A big thanks to the team at Webtide for helping us with this particular project.
If you are a developer already familiar with the Morph control panel, you'll notice we also updated the look and feel. We continue to make enhancements to make your interactions with our system easier. Hopefully you'll like this new look and find that it makes getting around your Morph AppSpace subscriptions a little easier.
Outside of the technology we have also added a few things to make it easier to tell your friends and associates about the Morph AppSpace solution. We now have a refer a friend feature as well as a referral program. Both of these capabilities actually link your account in a way that you are able to receive a referral bonus (either cash or Morph credits) for customers that you bring to Morph. So get out there and tell your friends about Morph, it may just pay off for you!
New Look, easier experience for developers
Based upon developer feedback, we have made some rather significant updates to our web applications today. Take a look through www.mor.ph and you should immediately see a difference.
