James "Jimmy" Blake is the Manager of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Security's Security Intelligence & Operations Consulting (SOC) Practice in EMEA.  HP's SIOC Practice helps enterprise customers build and maintain effective Security Operation Centres.

Prior to joining HP, Jimmy was Chief Information Security Officer for the UK's largest Software-as-a-Service vendor.  There he helped protect the data of millions of subscriber's across three continents in a dozen data centres.  Jimmy has over two decades Information Security and Business Continuity Management experience gained both in consultancy and working for leading security vendors.

Jimmy is a GIAC Certified Incident Handler (GCIH) Certified Information Security Systems Professional (CISSP), a Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), a Certified ISO 27001 Lead Auditor, a Certified Ethical Hacker for EC Council (C|EH) and holds a Certificate in Cloud Computing Security Knowledge (CCSK) from the Cloud Security Alliance.  Jimmy is also one one of the co-founders of the Security B-Sides London conference.

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Beta Testing in a SaaS World

I read with interest a comment on one of the posts from the Product Beautiful blog.  The topic of the post was about the 5 types of beta programs that organisations commonly end up with.

The comment by Michael Ray Hopkin suggested a sixth type of beta - the SaaS beta.
"Develop or convert your products to a hosted/SaaS model, ratchet up your release cycles to monthly, then you can call it a ‘release’ or a ‘beta.’  Either way customers get their hands on the new functionality.  The SaaS model is great in many ways, but the traditional concept of beta changes dramatically."

While I agree that SaaS totally changes what a beta means, you still need to manage and test new features.  This is especially important for mission critical applications such as email.

Managing the testing of new code in a truly multi-tenanted environment can be very complex - but then again so is building and maintaining a parallel grid architecture to process, store and retrieve decades worth of emails for tens-of-thousands of customers.  It is just something we needed to develop effective strategies for.

The thought of engineers throwing code up to SaaS platforms in the hope it works will make alarm bells ring in IT Manager's heads and does SaaS a great deal of injustice.

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