Back on the physical security. My old man has a successful building contractors business (main contractors for Esso, BP and Shell (I know I know, but we all use fuel and someone has to build the stations)) and they ‘had’ a laptop with all the Sage accounts on. You might guess what I am going to say…

…the laptop was stolen sometime over a weekend in November 2007(!). Yup, someone smashed a window risked the alarm noise and pulled the laptop from the desk and were away. The most recent accessible backup was 6 months previous. 3 temps where employed and trained to re-enter the 6 months of data as best they could to meet a VAT return deadline. A new accountant was employed to make sense of the garbage that was churned out and the inevitable missed transactions and typos made by the temps. New laptop and new backup system of course. Costs involved spiraled to the tens of thousands. OK, if they’d have taken a backup on the Friday night and stored that on a memory stick then they’d have been ok but it’s just that – you have to remember to do that. At least with an online system if your laptop is stolen you just plug in a new one and crack on, minus £500 for a new machine. It’s June 2009 and the company is still experience small repercussions of the loss of data.

I sleep at night knowing my data is safe and if my own hardware is damaged or stolen all I have lost is a computer and I just have to login to KF from a spare one or just get new one and be glad that my business can carry on without problems.

James Davis

If you want some financial reasons or disaster recovery reasons. Then a decent office server will cost you over £2000, then you need a backup plan and a maintenance plan (And someone that knows how to work it).

In contrast, so far we have spend our £15/mo with Duane (for about 18months now) and £60 for an annual subscription to Dropbox (https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTMwNTEzOQ). About £330 quid so far, we have much less IT overheads than the traditional server setup (Not bad for an IT related company!).

Our dropbox is sync’d between 4 machines and our KashFlow backup is emailed to a Google Mail account. Our data is on that many hard drives that the company should be able to continue to operate even if you throw the worst disaster you can think of at us!

For me, this by far out-weighs the extremely slim chance of someone else finding out who are clients are and what we charge them! TBH, I would probably tell anyone that asked anyway!

I must admit though that the question of data encryption is a pertinent one.

As to the thought of the software supplier having access to the data, this happens all the time when Sage et al are asked for support on corrupt data. It has to be realised that there is so much data for them to look at so they really don’t have the time or inclination to sift through it all to see ‘what might be useful’

Mind you, I don’t know why that exists, given the amount of balls ups made in the area of data security by the government and related bodies..!

Customer list is an interesting point.. I suspect for me its a continuance issue – e.g. the ‘what ifs’ of losing data. But that shouldn’t impact on the suitability of Saas – so we’re back to the emotive points. I’m sure I’ll get over it at some point, though.. 🙂

I suspect when you look at it a bit closer you realise it’s possibly your customer list you’re more concerned about.

I’ve seen this demonstrated in the past, as I used to work with some high grade co-lo hosting in the docklands.

However, I would still feel a bit uneasy putting accounting information online. I can’t describe why – this is one of the factors (the others are many and complex, and slowly being removed) which explains why I haven’t tried KF yet.

However. I use web-based email. There is a almost certainly at least some confidential information in my GMail archive. Are google more trustworthy than you? I don’t see any reason why this should feel different.

Therefore I think it’s simply psychological – it’s because it would be the data for “The Accounts” – some sort of odd mental block pops up and interferes.

Perhaps it is more my attitude and feelings towards “The Accounts” themselves, rather than anything to do with the environment in which the software is hosted, or the manner in which it is delivered? 🙂