For organisations which are expected to provide services to customers on a daily basis, more often than not, it is software that is enabling the workflows that deliver those services in a timely and efficient manner. As a result, it is becoming increasingly clear that today’s businesses are incredibly dependent on software for their day-to-day operations. According to a report released at the end of 2022, organisations use an average of 130 SaaS apps, an increase from 110 in 2021; SaaS adoption has seen a 16x growth since 2015.
For many years hosting software on the premises has served its purpose, but the reality is that technology is evolving, and cloud computing is at the forefront of this transformation – delivering computing services on the in the cloud to offer faster innovation and flexibility at reduced costs.
It is these competitive advantages of flexibility and scalability that has seen an increasing number of businesses adopting cloud services and has ultimately led to the boom that we are witness to in today’s cloud market. Predictions suggest that 85% of corporate apps will be SaaS-based by 2025. So how can software providers put themselves at the top of the list when it comes to the decision-making process?
For over 30 years, software escrow arrangements have been adopted by software customers to ensure business continuity, as well as by software vendors to provide peace of mind to their customers. And they have become increasingly important in recent years to offer a level of comfort for software customers in a cloud-driven, extremely competitive world.
Implementing a cloud escrow agreement enables organisations to explore cloud-hosted services with confidence that business-critical systems and data will always be available. Therefore, for an ISV to have such an “insurance policy” in place as part of their service offering it can already put them ahead of their competitors.
The past decade has seen the dramatic growth of technology start-ups around the world, but with such a competitive marketplace, start-ups are looking for value-add services that will enhance their proposition and give them a competitive edge. Technology suppliers which implement these agreements before approaching potential customers can put themselves one step ahead of the operational resilience conversation and in essence make themselves a much more appealing business supplier.
Here’s a snapshot of the EaaS solutions available to you so you can decide which option best supports you and your customers.
EaaS Access: Provide your customers with access to credentials for the live production environment. This enables the access and transfer of credentials for the latest iteration of the SaaS application within its current production environment.
EaaS Control: Provide your customers with access to the source code and build instructions of your software, this enables them to take full control of the SaaS application should they need it. They will also receive an architectural overview of how the application is hosted and its operational dependencies enabling them to continue to operate the live environment.
EaaS Replicate: If your customers are highly dependent on your software and it supports critical functions across the business, then the best option would be to provide a separately hosted replica of their application. Using a snapshot of the live environment NCC Group put this into a controlled environment which will ensure that if needed, your customers will have access to a separately hosted and mirrored instance of their software and unique data.
EaaS Scale: Simplify your software resilience estate with an automated environment depositing process. Source code, infrastructure as code, configuration, data back-ups and associated process documentation can all be deposited automatically, meaning that you can streamline the process and deliver EaaS services at scale.
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