SaaS For IT Management
This blog is all about using Software as a Service (SaaS) for IT Management.
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Another SaaS IT Benefit: Automatic Updates
Posted on September 1st, 2009 No commentsThe following post is cross-posted from the Aprigo Blog:
Last Thursday we announced the release of Aprigo NINJA . One of the cool built-in features is automatic updates.
When we thought about rolling out automatic updates, our motivation was streamlining user experience: We’re delivering a SaaS IT management product which needs to have a small presence in the customer’s environment. Now, when you develop a pure SaaS offering, with zero on-premise presence, all you have to do is update the back-end and the customer immediately enjoys the benefits of the new version (at least, the next time they log-in).
When developing a SaaS IT Management solution, we wanted to provide a similar experience even though our customers have a small (SaaS) client on-site (needed because after all you want to manage YOUR environment).
It’s a dilemma, but we’ve figured out a solution. So here’s what we’ve done:
- Back-end updates are transparent to customers (we’re running on AWS and there’s a lot of stuff that’s happening there: Servers, App servers, DBs, clustering, replication, snapshots etc.) This is one of the benefits of a SaaS IT Management offering - we remove the complexity out of the customer’s environment and updates happen without interference.
- We have an ‘update-aware’ SaaS client - when an update is available, the next time a customer logs-in to our AIR client (why we chose AIR is probably worthwhile a post on its own), they will see a message saying “a new version is available”. They then simply click a button to upgrade and that’s it.
The automatic upgrade.Again, we were thinking about streamlining the customer’s experience, but after reading a post on Everything Sysadmin that talked about automatic updates, I started to understand that automatic updates are also a key security issue (see the following ACM article by the Google Chrome authors on the security issues around automatic updates).
Wow. That struck my curiosity, so I started googling around, and landed on google’s blog post describing their automatic updater with lots of statistics that show the benefits of having an automatic update capability. Some examples:
- Increased security thanks to timely deployment of security vulnerability fixes
- Better software stability thanks to timely bug fixes
- New features that make software more powerful
At the same time, getting all users to work with the latest software release is advantageous for the vendor:
- Happier users due to more stable, more secure applications with additional features
- Less support required: only unfixed bugs in the latest version get reported by users
- Less testing: engineers don’t have to keep testing older versions on newer platforms and with new third party software or drivers
Even though the research is from the perspective of a web browser I feel it’s equally applicable on a wider scale; even when it comes to on-premise components.
So armed with this knowledge of the additional benefits, we’ll continue working on our next release and will work hard on delivering the next wave of SaaS IT Management solutions. In the meantime, if you want to work with us as a design partner, let us know. We’re always looking to work with people that are smarter than us!
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