Web Content Management: Is Your Data SaaSafe?
By Diane Wieland, special to TheContentWrangler.com
Shopping for a content management system (CMS) can be challenging. With hundreds of self-defined CMS vendors offering myriad solutions to choose from, it’s safe to say that selecting the right system for the job can be fraught with obstacles. Attempting to decipher and understand the CMS marketplace means mastering terminology and industry jargon used by software marketers, consultants and other industry insiders.
One concept that is increasingly associated with content management is Software as a Service (SaaS), sometimes referred to as “hosted” or “on-demand” content management systems. SaaS is an alternative to purchasing traditional software licenses and installing programs directly onto your servers or individual PCs. Instead, content management systems that follow the SaaS model are hosted remotely—by the software vendor—and are delivered to end-users on a subscription basis over the Internet. This model is being adopted by software vendors attempting to get their slice of the content management market. Analysts predict the on-demand method of delivery is the way most software will be provided to users in the future. They predict established CMS vendors will increasingly move away from traditional software sales models to the SaaS model. Some have already done so.
For organizations hoping to make the move to content management, selecting a CMS that is delivered as a service is an attractive option for many reasons, most of which are economic. Typically, SaaS solutions offer lower up-front costs, lower total cost of ownership, and much faster ramp-up and implementation cycles. Some experts point to other benefits, including the elimination of additional capital investments for functionality updates (your subscription is always current), to disaster recovery (all the information is stored and backed up off-site), and greater vendor accountability. SaaS vendors are responsible for their software working properly. They can’t blame software performance slowdowns or other snafus on your infrastructure, operating system, servers, nor your IT department. When something goes wrong, you know who to contact – you know who to blame. You have no responsibility for maintenance, upgrades, or system failures. You just log in and it works.
Depending on your company’s needs, hosted content management solutions can cost as little as a few hundred dollars per month, to a few thousand dollars per month.
A hosted software example: GoogleDocs and Spreadsheets
If you aren’t familiar with SaaS, a good introduction to this model is Google Docs and Spreadsheets, a free, hosted software solution that allows users to create, manage, and collaborate on documents and spreadsheets using a web browser. Google Docs and Spreadsheets work just like similar applications you might find on your workstation, but they free you from reliance on your PC. With GoogleDocs and Spreadsheets, all you need is a connection to the internet and web browser and your ready to work. You can use any computer, not just your own to access the software you need, when you need it.
Security: Keeping your content safe from harm and prying eyes
As you learn more about content management systems, trusting software vendors to sell you the right type of product gets easier. Trusting them with proprietary information? Not so easy. After all, you’ve got responsibilities. You need to be sure that your content is safe from hacking, system failures, man-made and natural disasters.
The security measures taken by SaaS vendors are impressive and might just surprise you. Hosted CMS vendors use methods that range from biometric scanning to on-site armed guards. Network protection is carried out though usage monitoring, reports and alerts, firewalls and encryption. Preventing system failures is usually a multi-pronged approach and includes such safeguards as redundant routers, diesel generators, and disaster management using back up and additional off-site storage facilities.
Photo © poco_bw – FOTOLIA
Dan Dube Managing Director, US Operations for DocZone.com says his company (and others) outsource data center management to Rackspace. “They are the industry leaders in data center management and security,” he says. “We let them do what they are best at so we can focus on providing the best software solution for our customers.”
DocZone.com offers XML-based content management and single-source publishing solutions to customers in the US and Europe. Their applications—and your data, illustrations, and multimedia—reside in Rackspace facilities that allow only data center operations engineers near routers, switches and servers. Security measures include 24/7 video surveillance and security guards. They use biometric hand scanners to restrict access to the data center, and Dube says, “Our data centers have full redundancy planning and meet the highest levels of security certification. We do daily full backups, which are mirrored in separate physical locations. In Dallas (the US data center location), the data center guarantees 100% uptime, and they have never been down in over 5 years!”
Reputable SaaS companies will work with your own IT security standards and can create parameters (like specified hours, browsers, and time zones) for using the software from your company location or anywhere you would like your team to work—from home, while traveling, etc., according to Robert Rose, Vice President, Marketing & Product Strategy for CrownPeak Technology .CrownPeak offers hosted Web content management solutions including full service asset management, and Web hosting, as well as value-added products such as e-newsletters, Web analytics, and customer relations management through partner software providers.
Any use outside the security parameters Rose mentions should raise a red flag. Much like your credit card company, hosted CMS vendors can track normal (and abnormal) use. Most vendors also provide monitoring and surveillance reports on system usage. CrownPeak goes a step further in their system reporting.
“We also have something we call our ‘system admin alert’ that is based on anomalies. What it does is actually look at the sum total of the things that have happened on the CMS, so if weird time zones are logging in or anything weird happens it can actually send an alert. For example, if a different IP address is trying to log in, multiple log-in attempts and failures occur, or different browsers are trying to log in that haven’t logged in before, we can send an alert.”
Finally, if you are running a mission critical web site, the protection of your data becomes a secondary concern if the site goes down. This is where the reliability of the power source comes in. Chris Adams, Director of Engineering and Co-Founder of Web content management provider HotBanana , suggests that companies looking at the SaaS option for content management “should choose one that uses a data center that has the full security of redundant backup for electricity in place.”
And preferably a data center (like the one HotBanana uses to service their North America customers) that is actually a point of presence, a physical location where multiple telecom companies’ data traffic flows into the country creating redundant connections. Those connections “share” internet fiber at that location so that if one were to fail, power would automatically switch over to another.
On the off-chance that something should happen to their redundant conductivity network, the best providers use diesel generators that can run until the power is restored. This protects your data in the event of wide-spread disasters or outages, but to protect you even more, the data centers back up your data and store it on tapes or digital vaults off-site at another data center in another region. So if you were to accidentally delete a file or a natural disaster strikes the data center, your data can be retrieved and restored.
Photo © Katrina Miller – FOTOLIA
Even though the chances are relatively slim that something could happen to your data, good hosted CMS providers use standard service level agreements that levy hefty fines and financial penalties against vendors for non-performance if systems should fail or data is lost. Those agreements are pretty standard and are usually based on industry best practices.
Additional Information
About the author: Diane Wieland is a technology writer who lives and works in Indianapolis. Contact her at dmwiel@comcast.net
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Nice write up, Diane. Interesting stuff.
I haven’t entirely wrapped my mind around the idea of a hosted content management system yet. It seems incongruous to sign a month-to-month contract as a permanent way to manage your content.
I wonder: are people using this kind of service as a low-cost pilot to demonstrate the benefits of investing in an in-house solution?
Thanks for your comments. I understand how the month-to-month versus permanent ideas may cause a conflict. Sort of an oxymoron, eh? Hmmm. I never thought of it that way.
But I do think of it as a way to get what you need faster and without having to make a large capital investment upfront, and ongoing–especially if you are a medium-sized business without a huge IT dept. Yes, you pay month to month, or per yearly contract in come instances, but you are paying for some of the same permanent things an IT department (or another outside vendor) gives you, such as backing up, and off-site storage for disaster recovery, keeping the software current and working. That costs money too, in the form of salaries, licenses, upgrades–not to mention the cost of customizing out-of-the-box software. So weighing the costs of one versus the other would be something you should do before you decide.
But to answer your real question, yes, this is an excellent solution to get your content management system started, which is sometimes the hardest part. You can use these SaaS products to get the ball rolling while your own IT department gets up to speed and builds your internal CMS–especially if you are moving over a mission critical web site. Then when you are ready to take over the task, you can–if you still want to.
We have a number of companies going through trials using our Hosted or On-Demand Content Management solution here at Astoria Software. Some of the companies who’ve started the trials planning to take the system in house at some point have actually decided to stay with the On-Demand solution on a permanent basis. The content is very secure as mentioned in this article, and the customer doesn’t have to worry about things like hiring IT staff to support, buying servers, setting them up, etc. One of the things they like best is they get a complete CMS solution very quickly.
Also, I wanted to mention a couple of conferences coming up that will give people more information about Software As A Service. The first is put on by OpSource, a hosting vendor that specializes in SaaS, here’s the link to their conference in March:
http://www.opsource.net/saas/summit2007/info/
Also, the Software and Information Industry Association is holding a conference in San Francisco in April where they will be discussing topics such as: “From Desktop to Webtop”, “Enterprise 2.0”, “Open Source”, “Software as a Service”, and “Globalization”.
Here’s the link info on this summit:
http://www.siia.net/s4/2007/default.asp
At DocZone.com, we have been selling an “On Demand” XML content management solution for over two years now. Surprisingly, I expected the issue of offsite data storage and data security to be a much bigger sales objection than what we have actually experienced.
Our customers have been quite satisfied with the level of data security that is mentioned in Diane’s article, and the compelling arguments of rapid setup time and much lower cost to get into a production environment greatly outweigh any perceived risks of offsite data storage.
RE:
<snip>
It seems incongruous to sign a month-to-month contract as a permanent way to manage your content. I wonder: are people using this kind of service as a low-cost pilot to demonstrate the benefits of investing in an in-house solution?
</snip>
What a great question – and at the risk of sounding a bit like Jeff Foxworthy… Here are the ways to know if you really are a Saas User… If you have a GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail or any other hosted email account, you’re already a SaaS User… And, if you use salesForce.com to manage customers, file your taxes using any of Intuit’s online services or if your company uses ADP for payroll processing – you’ve already made the leap to being a SaaS user that puts critical data across the network.
And, the only other point I’d make is that we don’t find most customers using the SaaS model to demonstrate the benefits of an installed model. In fact, that seems to be the actual oxymoron. The SaaS model for content management tends to demonstrate (quite effectively) the <euphemism> inefficiency </euphemism> of the installed software model. But then, as you might expect, I’m biased that way.
Thanks for your responses everyone.
I used to work in an Epic Editor shop that bridged to Chrystal Navigator, so you could perform certain Navigator functions from within Epic. Do SaaS solutions also provide the opportunity to bridge to your editing software?
Absolutely! You don’t want to give up the power of your editor with On-Demand. A good On-Demand content management solution should include all the pieces that are required for you to create, edit, manage and render content. We currently support PTC’s Arbortext Editor with Astoria’s On-Demand solution. Our bridge enables a menu from within the editor which can be used to manage your content within the repository.
Hi Amanda,
Great question. I can only speak for DocZone, of course, but in our case the answer is YES. We provide two options with our standard licensing model:
1) We bundle in a browser-based native XML editor with our solution as part of our standard monthly license fee. This is a full-featured XML/DITA editor that has the same capabilities as other commercial products (e.g., XMetaL, Arbortext, etc.)
2) We also support, at no additional fee, a tight integration with many of the leading desktop XML editors, including XMetaL, Arbortext/Epic, XMLspy, and several others. It provides the ability to browse the DocZone repository from these desktop tools, as well as create links to reusable components, images, etc. that are stored in DocZone.
One of the benefits I’ve seen with our customers adopting Astoria On-Demand is the focus on learning to use and apply applications much faster than in the past. On-Demand creates an environment where users can quickly adopt new techniques and processes as applications are pre-configured following best practices we’ve learned over the past ten years of CMS adoption.
As users gain experience, it is easy to then modify and adapt the environment based on what the group has learned. Customers can complete this work themselves, or work with Astoria experts via a brief live Web meeting.
As a vendor, I see that On-Demand has greatly assisted our customers with the rapid adoption of their new applications balancing industry standard approaches with the requirements of an organization.
I completely agree with Chip on this point – SaaS environments are much more quickly deployed into full production.
Prior to DocZone, most of my experience has been in systems integration and/or vendor implementation services for XML/SGML content management systems. In 70+ implementation projects, the very fastest implementation was 6 months to get into “full production” (where the client is using the new system exclusively). In fact, one of the reasons we started DocZone.com was to be able to offer a “quick deployment” methodology.
Now, our standard implementation is between 30-90 days, depending on the complexity of the environment. Relatively straightforward DITA-based applications for multilingual technical documentation and online help are now averaging 30-45 days to full production deployment…something that I would never be able to dream of in the traditional software implementation model.
Amanda,
Absolutely. Any CMS (hosted or otherwise) should now be able to bridge that gap effectively. Speaking just from the SaaS side of the fence – the only challenge that you’ll find is that SaaS vendors are almost exclusively focused on “web” content management -rather than ECM. This is because of the inherent “limitation” of a browser-based interface. That’s not to say that SaaS based web cms solutions can’t manage digital assets – many do a great job at them including versioning, rollback, image manipulation, meta data management etc.. etc… But, for the obvious reason, you won’t effectively use a hosted CMS for managing things like (for example) a large repository of high-resolution images… There’s some subtlety here – but won’t belabor that in this post.
However, on the plus side… A relatively sophisticated SaaS CMS provider will give you MUCH more control over your web properties than the more traditional players ever did. So, gone are the days of two editors to manage content vs. navigation, or an editor to manage HTML vs. XML etc.. etc… Any good CMS offered as a hosted service should be able to publish in multiple formats, multiple languages, manage multiple web sites, navigation etc.. etc…
Hope that’s helpful….
This is a great thread. I think these are the types of issues that will need to be discussed openly and honestly by vendors as more and more folks look to SaaS solutions. I also think these are the types of issues that are needed to be discusssed at our upcoming Content Management Professionals Spring 2007 Summit, April 13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The event theme: Managing Content Management Projects (http://www.cmpros.org).
The SaaS CMS model really shakes things up and will shift much of the burden for CMS implementation to the hosted software vendor, it seems. The topics we discuss at the upcoming CM Pros Summit need to include the SaaS way of thinking. I trust all of you plan to attend the event and participate in the discussion.
As always, I have found the CM Pros Summit to be a very educational event for vendors and their sales staff. Only when sales teams truly understand real projects potential customers would like to tackle can they position their products as potential solutions. With that said, I hope to see you all in San Francisco this April.
Thanks—and keep the conversation moving.
For those of you reading along (and lurking without participating)—welcome! Please consider checking out the Astoria Software blog (thanks Chip!) for some interesting articles also worthy of your attention. And, don’t miss Evaluating, Implementing and Deploying a Content Management System, a recent whitepaper from Crown Peak (thanks Rob!). And, of course, our friends at DocZone have an article of interest in Clientside News (thanks Dan!).