Security & reliability matter. Actually, they’re critical.

Until recently, formal certification of information security technology was a long and costly necessity of doing business.

No longer. Salesforce can handle these costs at a larger scale, which lower costs relative to on-premise technology.

Below is a summary of the rigorous audits performed and formal certifications that Salesforce has been awarded.

Third-Party Audits

Scrutiny by trusted third-party auditors yields formal assurance in the form of third-party certifications:

• SAS 70 type II – is an independent 3rd party audit of internal controls and data security controls.
• SYSTrust Certificate – is an independent evaluation measuring a service provider against four essential principles: availability, security, integrity, and maintainability.
• ISO 270001 – international standard of information security best practice providing comprehensive best-practice advice and on how to design, implement and maintain a compliant information security management system.

Customer Audits

Salesforce.com operations receive routine scrutiny from customers. Once example is the demanding security audit that ING Bank completed before selecting Salesforce. ING Bank is now one of Salesforce’s largest financial services clients.

Still not convinced?

An overview of Force.com security can be found here, or watch the “Introduction to Force.com Security” webinar (originally recorded on October 9th, 2009).

We’d love to hear from you, so contact us to discuss any Salesforce/Force.com security questions you may have.

Symantec surveyed 1,600 companies worldwide (414 from the Asia Pacific) and released a report entitled, “State of the Data Center”.

The report highlights the risks and challenges confronting Australian organizations in implementing and managing storage.

You’ll probably relate when reading how, “the IT manager’s “to do” list is as long as ever. Applications continue to grow in number and complexity. Servers remain underutilized. Storage continues to grow but is also underutilized. And disaster recovery plans – more important than ever – are still not fully complete”.

New Years is right around the corner. Make your companies New Years resolution to simplify and reduce IT costs by moving to the cloud.

Download the full report here.

On-premises computing often come with a host of issues and challenges that most business people would rather not have to deal with. You don’t own and operate your own power plant, so why do you own and operate a data centre?

Leave it to the experts.

Below are 5 reasons you’ll sleep better after making the switch to the Force.com platform.

1. Physical Security: Salesforce’s data centres are humidity and temperature controlled with redundant cooling systems. The buildings have 24-hour manned security, including foot patrols and perimeter inspections, biometric scanning for access, video surveillance throughout facility and perimeter, and all computing equipment is stored in access-controlled steel cages. How does your physical security compare against that?
2. Backups: Data is backed up to tape at each data centre, on a rotating schedule of incremental and full backups. The backups are cloned over secure links to a secure tape archive. Tapes are not transported offsite and are securely destroyed when retired. In addition, you can schedule a full or custom export of the data in your system so you have a local copy.
3. Availability: At trust.salesforce.com, Salesforce shows the live and historical status of each server. Up-to-the minute information on system performance provides unprecedented transparency.
4. Disaster Recovery: Salesforce performs real-time replication to disk at each data centre, and near real-time data replication between the production data centre and the disaster recovery centre. In addition, data is transmitted across encrypted links and disaster recovery tests verify projected recovery times and the integrity of your data. How does your existing disaster recovery compare?
5. Upgrades: With Salesforce.com, you receive updates three times a year. For free. Automatically. Welcome to the end of costly software maintenance fees.

Cloud computing removes the need to install any software, buy servers, upgrade servers, back-up data, etc. The result is massive cost savings due to reduced staffing, maintenance and power consumption.

Oh, and you’ll sleep better.

Contact us today to learn more how the Force.com can help your business.

A recent article from ComputerWorld discusses 5 relevant business benefits of CRM. They are:

Business Payoff #1: Increased sales productivity, improved profitability. A properly implemented SaaS CRM system can mean measurable improvements in deal win rates, number of deals completed per sales rep, and higher average sale prices (ASPs).

Business Payoff #2: Better visibility and control.

Business Payoff #3: Less waste in marketing and sales. John Wannamaker’s famous quote, “only half my advertising works I just don’t know which half,” seems to apply to all marketing activities. But a well-configured CRM system can provide pretty solid measurement of marketing effectiveness, with ROI metrics down to the individual campaign level.

Business Payoff #4: Business agility, competitive responsiveness. The CRM system will provide you with the metrics and visibility to identify competitive problems and test solutions for best results. While this applies to any modern CRM system, there’s another level of agility that applies more to SaaS systems that support Agile methods in IT.

Business Payoff #5: Make your priciest business process more reliable. Typically, the highest paid people in the company will be in sales. Yet the company’s most unreliable business process is revenue generation.

The author notes, “Nothing comes for free – Salesforce.com, like any CRM system, is no “point and shoot” miracle. You need to do a lot of work in data cleanup, system integration, and process improvements to enable the business impacts described.”

Here at Myriad Minds, we find that to be 100% true. CRM is a methodology that has significant organisational implications. Managing the “soft” side of a CRM implementation is every bit as crucial as managing the system itself.