The weakest link in Software as a Service

RE: That hurts

Well said.

I think a lot of it is down to the way humans judge risk. To use an analogy, many people are really scared of flying because of the perceived risks, but will happily get in a car. One involves placing your trust in people who are highly trained and highly regulated, where the vehicles are well maintained, and an industry that actually has a good record overall. The other involves placing your life in the hands of people who got the bare minimum of training, possibly only just scraped through the test, and have never had their skills checked since - and often using vehicles that only get the bare minimum of maintenance the owner can get away with (and only then when the annual basic check comes around).

So what is the difference ?

Well to start with, when flying, unless you are the pilot then you get a seat with a poor view and you have no control over your own destiny. The downside to being the pilot of course is that you are normally closest to the accident since aircraft don't normally reverse into things in the air :) Accidents are generally not common, and when they do happen are often hyped in the media. Though things do seem to be improving, a typical report of a small plane making an emergency landing might well mention that it missed a school by only 2 miles ! The fact that accidents to commercial aircraft to tend to involved infrequent but large loss of life tends to dominate memories (Pan Am over Lockerbie, and Tenerife 1977, for examples), while incidents where people walked away tend to be less well remembered : The "Sullenberger Approach" to a landing on the Hudson River, and the "Gimly Glider" as examples.

So flying is associated with "we're all going to die" if anything goes wrong.

But for driving, it's something most people do every day - there's no novelty value, and accidents are so common that they rarely make mass media headlines. Only the most serious even make national TV news, while most will be lucky to do more than the front page of the local rag. Yet in the UK alone, around 8 people a day are killed on the roads.

That means in the UK alone, 2 to 3 times as many people are killed on the roads each year as are killed worldwide in aircraft accidents. Yet people are scared of flying, but not worried at all about driving.

So it's all, or mostly (yes I know, there's all sort of other factors to include), down to perception.

Getting back to the subject of SaaS, I think it's much the same.

With SaaS you are not in control, and something you can't control is something most people fear - even if you are outsourcing to a much bigger organisation that can throw more knowledge/skills at the problems than you as a small business can justify. Yes, in house measures (whether it's security or backups or availability) are likely to have problems, but they are something you feel you have control over and can juggle with your priorities. Once you outsource all that, you lose visibility and control - and that causes fear.

Yes, as professionals we should be able to look at this sort of thing objectively, but we are also human and suffer from all those human traits. Also, at the end of the day, many decisions come down to preference - you often cannot say option A is better or worse than option B, just different, and you make a personal decision based on which you prefer.