The Cloud is Saas-y

If you are a CIO, CFO, Advisor or Business Owner then SaaS has become an increasingly compelling choice over software. Online accounting is on the shopping list rather than the future wishlist. The questions are increasingly about how to change rather than is it secure. Not adopting SaaS has switched from being viewed as “risk averse” behaviour to one of “please explain why we are spending a fortune on software licenses”. Ask yourself “can I outperform the Cloud and SaaS providers on security if I take that risk on myself in house and manage and host my own software and data?”

SaaS contains a lot of sugar and spice. It turns CapEx into OpEx. It gives you capacity to burst workflow and users. It enables work from home for parents. Small business owners can take that holiday, do the online accounting payrun from afar and keep up to date. It’s liberating technology. If you aren’t a believer ask yourself why every major software company around the world is busily trying to reinvent themselves. They are busy getting their pilots license so they can fly into the cloud.

Choose an online accounting system based on credentials. Being a traditional software company is far from an appropriate credential to do cloud based applications well. Do you want to back an old dog trying to learn new tricks? Choose SaaS providers who are profitable, there are many. Most important of all is to look at their breed. Do they have a history of free tax updates? Do they let you export your data? Do you get stung for high support costs? Many new SaaS providers along with the old software companies fail on this. What’s their motive? Barriers to exit? What are their ethical genetics like in light of this?

Look for SaaS companies that will let you fly like you’re in an A380, that has the scale and all the mod cons and features you expect in this new age. One that you can trust.

Photo by VSZ