Companies such as Salesforce.com have been delivering software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for customer relationship management and other business needs for years. And while some I.T. professionals have been cautious about relying on such hosted applications, that could soon change.
On Tuesday, EMC announced EMC Fortress, described as a secure development platform, and its first application, an online backup service called MozyEnterprise. The release follows EMC’s acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems last October.
“Our strategy is focused on bringing new software-as-a-service offerings to market, powered by EMC,” said Tom Heiser, senior vice president and general manager of EMC’s new SaaS unit.
EMC said MozyEnterprise automates secure online backup and recovery over the Internet for “consistent and reliable” offsite data backup.
Acceptance of SaaS
The release indicates a “growing acceptance of software-as-a-service offerings,” Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, said in a telephone interview. “Salesforce.com has turned the corner on the traditional reticence.”
The cornerstones of SaaS adoption are expense and simplicity, King added. “Software as a service plays well where there’s an enterprise-class product that’s easier to use and more cost-effective than running the solution in-house,” he said.
The timing of this product intersects with the rapidly expanding amount of storage available in employee laptops and desktops. “EMC really hit the note here,” King said, “because business employees are storing more and more data on laptops than ever before.”
Most businesses, King went on to say, realize that the “information being stored on employee laptops constitutes valuable corporate data and that adequate backup is important.”
Verizon Signs On
King expects MozyEnterprise to conquer lingering concerns about storing corporate data offsite. “There have been some issues around whether businesses are willing to store data in a data center with other businesses’ information,” King said. With MozyEnterprise, though, “not only is data encrypted on backup, it’s also stored in an encrypted…