The Downsides of SaaS

I beleive that Software as a Service is a growth industry in the legal field and that, as programs get more complicated and more expensive, more people will be moving to a SaaS model for at least some of their software needs.

A recent problem with Google Docs, however, highlights one of the potential problems with SaaS solutions: your documents are the in hands of someone else. ZD Net reported that Google admitted that .05% of its Google documents that were supposed to be private were treated as public.

Now, I have not heard any horror stories about how confidential information was exposed during this incident. However, this incident does highlight the fact that when choosing a SaaS provider or when choosing to place any of your documents in a remote location (typically over the internet), investigate your provider to make sure that they are taking adequate measures to protect your information and keep it confidential and to ensure that if something does happen, that they will act promptly to correct the problem.

Has Anyone Tried Box.net?

Google Docs and Zoho seem to be getting all of the press for online document creation and collaboration. I recently discovered an additional service Box.net. Box.net allows you to upload files and store them on their server. Additionally, you can edit these documents online as well as share them with anyone you wish.

Box.net is primarly a online storage, access, and collaboration, service. As a consequence, it uses Zoho to edit documents and Picnik to edit pictures.

Box.net offers four different plans, including a free plan with 1GB of storage as well as a paid plan at $19.95 a month for 15GB of storage.

A cool feature that I like about the service is that you can access it from a web enabled cell phone.

I have just signed up for the service and haven’t had a chance to really try it out yet. I would be curious to hear from anyone who has experience with the service.