AXLR8 are delighted to have achieved Cyber Essential Plus again this year. The standard has risen due to an increased international growth in cyber threats. So AXLR8 have also had to work even harder to meet the challenge.

Thanks once again to our team at Right Cue who have advised us and helped us raise our game and improve internal processes and systems to be better prepared.

We have just passed our Cyber Essentials audit for this year. This year’s assessment was much tougher than last year but we were given notice about that by our assessor 12 months ago and have upgraded many of our resources to overtake the evolving threats.

Thanks as ever to the clear guidance and explanations from RightCue.

Next we have Pen Testing and following that in Late December, we start our Cyber Essentials Plus preparatory scans and physical audit. If you have not been through this process with your company, please think about it. The cyber threats are real and we highly recommend Cyber Essentials for cyber peace of mind and now use it for the more stringent Cyber Essentials Plus exercise each year.

If you need to know who did what and when on the AXLR8 system, you can refer to the comprehensive audit data that is recorded as your users work.

This article from our public sector website demonstrates an example from workflow in a business area with very strict compliance compliance requirements. There are examples from our finance and staffing clients, as you can imagine.

However, the monitoring is mostly used not for compliance or establishing who was responsible for a change or for “Big Brother” staff monitoring. It is mostly used on a day-to-day basis for training and occasionally for diagnostics.

Audit trail data is also used for KPIs examples we have put into AXLR8 Reports (also spreadsheets, pivot tables and Power BI models) recently, include:

• recruitment applicant tracking progress (time in different job application stages from application to interview, to hiring, etc.
• sales KPIs – client contact activity rates, follow ups, etc.

Please let us know if there are audit data you need and your AXLR8 consultant will assist you to find an existing report or create a new report using AXLR8 RB.

In recent article, we looked at what checklist items you should look for in a SaaS supplier for your business critical applications. We included security accreditations and a solid reliable support team and a long track record of client retention.

One of the most important factors now is financial stability of your critical suppliers. If your supplier goes bust, the outcome for your business is unpredictable. A key part of many crashes over the last two hundred years is the domino effect of good businesses being taken down by bad businesses.

Due to the pandemic, we have lived through challenging times. Like many historical downturns, it will be followed by more economic turbulence. This time it looks like the war in Ukraine will have many side effects. In previous crashes and recessions and macro economic financial upheavals, more businesses failed after the recession than on entry or during the down times. So now is the key time to check out your SaaS supplier.

At AXLR8, we did this market analysis recently. AXLR8 have a strong balance sheet and have never borrowed money. This careful financial approach has meant personal sacrifice but has left us financially much stronger than our competitors. Losses in the down times are covered by hard earned reserves. This is important because our clients rely upon us for their operational systems – now and in the future.

We recently benchmarked our balance sheet against competitors. Like us they must pay wages and keep servers running in the cloud. Both are expensive with unpredictable costs – especially for security enhancements to counter ever increasing threats. One way they may be saving money that is invisible in customer service, is to skimp on expensive security upgrades. This is the equivalent for your business, of an airline not bothering with maintenance and pre flight safety checks on their aircraft.

With a simple Companies House check, we discovered that we have been competing in most of our core markets with our own positive balance sheet but this is not the rule. There are companies with one employee who have been steadily drifting more and more negative for years. What will his clients do if his wife tells him to go and get a proper job? Worse, there are two companies with fantastic websites and a few good references who are £250k underwater and one has not published their accounts for two years! They should swallow their pride and merge or sell out because they are risking huge damage for their clients.

So, take five minutes to check out your SaaS supplier and assess the consequences of their failure. If you are about to buy a system, again, check their finances not just how nice their website and screens look.

Software as a Service (SaaS) has revolutionised our lives and freed most of us from large up-front development costs, expensive on-premise hardware and associated software and networks.

You just sign up and everything magically appears with your business data, pictures, documents. It is all backed up and safe. However, have you checked the provider is actually doing what they promised? AXLR8 have been in the SaaS business for over 2 decades and trust many suppliers but check everyone.

What questions should I ask an SaaS supplier?

Here are a few questions we suggest that you ask your SaaS supplier.

Business Stability

1. Do you track their published accounts every year? Remember, the pandemic has tested all companies and many SaaS companies may be running on empty. More companies go out of business coming out of a recessionary period than going in to it!
2. Are they debt free or do they have a negative balance sheet? If negative, is it getting worse year on year? Could the bank “pull the plug” tomorrow?
3. Is the Supplier financially stable? Remember, if they miss payments to a lender, any of their key staff or any of their hosting and technology suppliers, they could disappear overnight and your data and system will probably be lost!
4. Does the SaaS company have a portfolio of markets they work in so that a change in one market does not wipe them out overnight? Importantly, after the pandemic, are they already “running on empty”?
5. How long have they been in business? Is their business growing or, if it has been through some recessions and recovered competently, all the better!
6. Do they have many clients in their portfolio?
7. Do they have an expert stable team or is there staff turnover? Worst of all, is it a one or two person company which could disappear with the health or motivation of one person?

My business critical data

1. Do they answer their telephones in an emergency?
2. Can I get my data from my SaaS supplier (free or for a reasonable small labour and materials fee)?
3. Where can I read my contract for the service? If it was just something I clicked “OK” to when I signed up, then was there a clause to say they can change it at any time?
4. Do I own my data entirely or do the supplier feel they own it?
5. Does my supplier understand their responsibility as Data Processor and how it affects my liability under GDPR as the Data Controller?
6. Who decides access rights for my staff? What happens when staff join or leave?
7. If I am using the system free of charge, do the suppliers expect something back and if so, what?
8. If I am paying, what if I miss a payment? Is there a small or large admin penalty? When does all my data get deleted? No supplier can store it indefinitely due to GDPR DP liabilities. If they do not delete my data, what are they doing with it?
9. When can I give notice and what are the implications for recovering my data and any associated documents, mails, pictures, etc?
10. Is the SaaS supplier compliant with cyber security standards? For example, can you find them on the IASME Cyber Essentials Plus compliant companies?
11. Do your SaaS supplier have a reputable company for regular annual penetration testing to check security of the systems holding your (customer) data?
12. What are their security policies?
13. What are their privacy policies and can you find them on the Information Commissioner’s registration list?
14. Can I talk to someone – a real human being – about the technical or commercial issues that arise?
15. Can I customise and personalise the system and how does this affect my rights to upgrades?
16. How often do they actually do back ups? Nightly, hourly, weekly? Are back ups hot? In other words, if my server goes down, does another one come up immediately? These different levels of disaster readiness come with very different price tickets. What level of resilience do I need?
17. Can they scale with my business?
18. Will they offer training for super users of the system?

Build vs Buy: should we just develop our own in-house system?

Before developing your own system with a software developer or an in-house developer, you should also be able answer the above questions.

You will be aware of the well known economics of software development:

If it costs 1 pound to develop a system,

it costs 10 pounds to implement and another 10 pounds to document it

15 pounds a year to maintain it and

150 pounds a year to support it.

Outside developers bidding for your business conveniently forget that in their pitch!

On top of that, complying with basic security and GDPR is very costly and you would be paying for it on your own. A SaaS supplier can share those costs around hundreds or even thousands of users.

A reputable SaaS supplier can also bring specialist expertise and new modules from the accumulated experience of thousands of users to your business. They can concentrate on updating their platform, performance, bug fixes, encryption, security. Do not underestimate these expenses. Their helpdesk is always there. Your inhouse developer could be off sick or go on holiday – or leave the company just when you have a critical repair.