Sickening sound of the day.

If you’ve never heard this sound, consider yourself blessed. That’s the sound of a hard drive that’s left this world. This particular drive is my son’s. Had I told him to burn data CDs of critical files? Yes. Had I suggested he forward key documents to his free email accounts for safekeeping? Yes. Did he do it. No. Will I remind him of these key facts for the next year? Oh, yes. There’s an unnecessarily hard lesson learned. It’s just serendipity that his mp3 player happened to finally sync up without explanation a day or two before the drive’s death.

True, backing up locally has come a long way in recent years, but there’s still something appealing about having your data and even your key applications hosted and managed somewhere else, especially in a broader context than my son’s room.

Due to a planning oversight, on a recent flight my reading material was limited to the airline’s free magazine (In this case, the magazine was called “GO,”) and inside was a handy one-page summary of considerations in deciding on software on demand, aka Software as a Service (SaaS.)

The benefits listed include:

• reduced need for IT people and hardware
• faster implementation
• automatic upgrades
• Employees can access from anywhere

And among the things to investigate from a particular provider:

• Security — protections and redundancies against hackers, failures, and acts of God
• customization — is it possible? Is it easy?
• (my editorial addition) Will this make that sickening sound less sickening?

[tags] software on demand, saas, [/tags]