BasicGov / BLOG

SaaS and Privacy Policy

What’s the difference between privacy and security?  Security is all about who can access your data.  Privacy is about what people can do with the data they do have access to.   How do SaaS providers ensure privacy?

Because personal data is handled and stored by your SaaS application provider, you would want to know that they hold your data in as high or higher regard than you do. What governs and restricts how, when, what can be done with your own contact data and your municipalities’ constituent data (it is your data) is referred to as the privacy policy.

As a SaaS provider with a Salesforce.com partnership, local government software subscribers, not only have their privacy policy aligned with those of TRUSTe, the internet privacy giant boasting the strongest and most trusted privacy policy model in the business, but with Salesforce.com it is actually certified by TRUSTe.  This ensures that subscribers enjoy privacy protections in accordance with TRUSTe’s strict privacy principles, and that all customer information is respectively treated as though it were sensitive and not made available to 3rd parties for their own use.  Data is managed responsibly, while ownership of the  data remains firmly assigned to the municipality.

Click here to read last week’s post about SaaS and security.

Change is good!

I recently did an interview with a local journalist about how we moved CloudBench from enterprise software to a SaaS business model (see BC Business article from interview, “The Accidental Innovator”). While we’re still learning how to explain the benefits of SaaS to our local government marketplace, there were some key lessons I learned as we moved from traditional software to a subscription-based product.

Lesson 1: Sometimes the safe, proven solution is the most dangerous for both customers and suppliers.  When we still ran an enterprise business, it was hard work to get customers live quickly.  This was frustrating for them because anyone who takes months – even years – to go live will eventually question their purchase decision.  And it was expensive for us, as more and more working capital was needed to span the time we were working for clients who weren’t ready to pay us.

Lesson 2: SaaS and cloud computing were already being adopted by businesses and consumers.  You didn’t need to be Nostradamus to predict that government would also adopt the technology.

Lesson 3: You can’t run a Hummer franchise under the same roof as a Toyota dealership.  Building a SaaS business alongside traditional enterprise software is a recipe for internal strife.  Enterprise revenues are threatened by SaaS’s dramatically lower cost and time to implement.  As the SaaS team wins more business, enterprise revenues are cannibalized and the staff on the traditional side of the business don’t know whether to switch jobs or change company.

So was the change easy?  No.  Would I do it again? Absolutely!