A recent blog post on ITSM Portal suggested that while IT Service Management aims to develop best practices and processes that marry IT service delivery with business needs for operational efficiencies and financial benefits, ITSM products for data protection, encompassing backup, replication, retention, and recovery are rare.

The blog suggests that in these environments, data protection is a critical IT service with business, financial and operational impact, and organizations that choose to adopt data protection as an IT service, would be wise to implement Service Level Agreements (SLAs) governing performance, availability and recovery/response as determined by business needs. Disaster recovery, of course, is one fundamental benefit of ITSM delivered using Software as a Service (SaaS), such as the latest version of EasyVista, EasyVista 2010.

For EasyVista, disaster recovery services are one key element that are already included in annual subscriptions. And it’s not just with disaster recovery where organisations benefit from a SaaS-based approach. Upgrading without SaaS can be a headache, with upgrades spanning months or even years, and requiring an army of professional services people to get the job done, a move that only increases cost.

But with SaaS, software upgrades are down to the vendor and don’t need the same level of technical support compared to running the application in-house. With costs in mind, it’s worth re-iterating that a recent Total Economic Impact (TEI) analysis by Forrester revealed a stunning 271 percent ROI over three years with payback within 12 months for one organization that deployed EasyVista on premise within its IT department.

Based on these findings, companies looking to deploy EasyVista can see clear cost avoidance benefits with regard to the legacy ITSM solution, development & IT administration cost savings and productivity gains. Using the Forrester TEI framework, many companies may find the potential for a compelling business case to make such an investment. The ability to codelessly customize EasyVista to meet customer requirements ensures the lowest enterprise IT Service Management Total Cost of Ownership. By eliminating the time and cost restraints inherent in legacy products that require extensive development and professional services, EasyVista customers are able to focus on their core business.

It is important to remember that the organization in Forrester’s TEI analysis chose to deploy EasyVista on-premise. However, companies that choose to use EasyVista in SaaS mode experience additional benefits such as lower upfront costs, transparent upgrades, zero maintenance and no additional cost for hardware required to host the solution.