SaaS: Software as a Service for Staffing and Recruiting Software
PART 4: The Security and Stability of Your SaaS Staffing and Recruiting Software
Some who might prefer an enterprise application may ask, "What could be more secure than our own environment?" When evaluating your options, there are reasonable questions your evaluation team should ask. Firms evaluating SaaS should go through a due diligence process to ensure their software investment is housed in a secure and stable environment.
How secure is vendor-hosted software?
Any SaaS deployment is only as good as the security and stability of the IT infrastructure in which it is housed. To ensure the reliability of staffing and recruiting software that you use day-in and day-out, make sure your software vendor hosts your application in a Tier-1 Premium Data Center or houses your application in a similarly secure facility. A Tier-1 facility provides the following features and services:
- N+1 HVAC
- Pre-action dry pipe fire suppression
- N+1 generator capacity
- N+1 uninterrupted power supply
- Redundant power to your equipment cabinet
- 24x7x365 access
- Biometric scanner physical access security
- Closed circuit TV coverage throughout facility
- Proximity reader cards
- Direct connection to regional Internet backbone
- Redundant data center network infrastructure
- Burstable bandwidth
What happens if my vendor's servers go down?
Make sure that your vendor uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). This enables them to proactively monitor all of your hardware devices including: hard drives, memory, CPU, interface cards, power supplies, fans and temperature. Often, with proactive monitoring of the performance and status of all of the hardware devices, a problem can be fixed before you even know about it.
Be sure to determine that your software vendor also has a solid data backup routine that should include:
- A full database backup every night with hourly transaction log backups throughout the day
- Weekly full backup and monthly full backup routines
- Each weekly backup should be stored off site for a three-week period
- Each monthly backup is stored off site for a 12-month period
- An annual backup routine which is stored for a five-year period
Online data security is another issue that you should address with your software vendor.
How do they manage data security and access?
Make sure that your vendor protects your data through state-of-the-art firewalls and secure access to the application servers so there is no public exposure of sensitive personnel data. Ask your vendor who has access to your database. It should be limited to specific software vendor personnel.
Additionally, if the staffing software solution you are looking at has email integration, make sure to assess email security. Your vendor should have the ability to encrypt email and product data with a 128-bit SSL certificate as well as with up-to-date email security software.
If you’ve satisfied yourself that the benefits and security of SaaS delivery appear to be a good fit for your business, there’s one last thing to consider. The future.
PART 5 : What the Future Holds for SaaS Staffing and Recruiting Software
Click to view more about SaaS for Staffing and Recruiting Software
PART 1: Software as a Service for Staffing and Recruiting Software - What is SaaS?
PART 2: SaaS Staffing and Recruiting Software Deployment Approaches
PART 3: The Benefits of SaaS Staffing and Recruiting Software
PART 4: The Security and Stability of SaaS Staffing and Recruiting Software
PART 5: The Future of SaaS Staffing and Recruiting Software
For more staffing and recruiting software articles and white papers check out:
http://www.vcgsoftware.com/newsroom-techarticles.asp
Pointwing Focus:
Download the Pointwing recruiting software product brochure.PDF files require the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe.