SaaS: maintaining business continuity during COVID-19

The coronavirus COVID-19 (coronavirus) is impacting businesses around the world. 

Like most organisations, Duco is implementing parts of our own business continuity plan (BCP). We provide a critical service to global systemically important financial institutions, so we take this very seriously and have stringent measures in place. 

Even prior to the pandemic, any of our staff could work from home with full access to all the tools and resources they needed. Duco employees can be fully effective from any remote location, so moving the whole company to working from home was a relatively easy change for us. 

The secret? As far as possible we use Software as a Service (SaaS) tools to carry out our daily work. These are hosted services, rather than on-premise deployments, that we can access easily via a browser from any location. They include the Google suite for email and document management, BambooHR for administration, Zendesk for customer success, Salesforce for CRM, HubSpot for marketing, NetSuite for accounting, Jira for development, etc.

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Most people understand the commonly cited advantages of SaaS:

• No hardware to purchase

• No software to install

• No networks to configure

• Nothing to maintain

• Regular releases with updated features

This results in lower upfront costs, reduced time to benefit, easier availability of upgrades and patches, greater flexibility, and greater scalability.  

But it’s easy to overlook another benefit: reduced administrative overhead. During challenging periods, the last thing you want to be doing as an organisation is struggling with monitoring and maintaining multiple on-premise systems.  These tasks can be a real headache when the workforce is remote and fighting fires across the organisation.  

For SaaS companies, ensuring their service continues to operate for clients is the key priority.  For example, here at Duco, we recognise and acknowledge the important role we play in our own customers’ BCP plans. Due to the measures we have taken, we can ensure our services are securely available from wherever our customers’ users are located – so they can focus resources on other critical issues in running their businesses. 

Our customers can, therefore, have confidence that we will keep their critical services running, just as we have confidence in the SaaS providers we rely on.  It’s a good situation to be in and simplifies risk management during difficult periods. At Duco, we have always strongly believed that SaaS is the future. With BCPs in sharp focus, moving to SaaS is fast becoming a necessity.  

For more information go to www.du.co

For more information on business topics in Canada, please take a look at the latest edition of Business Chief North America