Value creators — Storage

Your product must create value for its customers. The best way of identifying value is through discovery in your target market but there are several common categories of value that are often present across successful SaaS products. This “Value creators” series of articles describes ten key value creators that you should consider when designing new products or researching growth opportunities.

The first article relates to Storage — not necessarily the most exciting capability, but one that is universal and highly valued by customers.

Storage

The ability for a product to store data. This data could be electronic records, images, video or audio. Think of some of the biggest SaaS products such as Salesforce or Workday. You could argue that their primary function is storage. Products must safely store customer data in a secure, efficient way and allow that data to be found and retrieved by users who have the required authorisation.

Customers will value the ability to store large volumes of data, encrypt it, index it, and search for it. They may also want the ability to configure complex access and retention rules.

Even though data upload, storage and retrieval processes are fairly generic across different data types, firms will often buy dedicated products to store certain types of data such as HR records, tax records or customer relationship information.

There are various reasons for this including:

• The “owner” of the business function does not want the data they are responsible for mixing with other types of business data.
• The perception is that the data is more secure and that users will not accidentally mistake sensitive information with other non sensitive data.
• The data is segregated and so does offer some level of protection if authorisation rules are not configured correctly or the authorisation implementation is compromised.
• There is some redundancy in having multiple systems store different types of data.
• Some storage systems have specific additional features and functionality that are specific to a certain type of business and the data they are likely to store.

Furthermore, in some cases, local data protection laws may mandate that data should “reside” within a certain jurisdiction. These laws can be complex and so firms often conservatively implement multiple storage systems in different jurisdictions in order to meet these requirements.

Different business records types will have a host of additional regulatory requirements depending on the type. These regulatory requirements must be met and customers will pay to ensure they can meet their obligations. Especially if the solution can provide evidence of compliance in a format that is appropriate to provide to the regulator.

Storing large amounts of enterprise data securely and in a regulatory compliant way can be complex. Enterprise customers understand this and are willing to pay a premium to ensure that there are multiple levels of protection in place. Solutions will be discounted if they do not meet stringent security and infrastructure requirements.

Different firms will have different data security and governance requirements from each other and even within the same firm in different jurisdictions. Solutions that offer multiple storage configurations and implementations and can support multiple authorization configurations will be attractive.

Firms generally generate data faster than they archive it and can have specific requirements about the generation and storage of archives. US regulatory requirements require that certain types of data are stored as WORM — Write Once and Read Many and a detailed index is maintained. This aims to ensure that the data cannot be tampered or removed.

Consider storage if your product or data is hosted by a cloud service provider. You need to thoroughly understand where and how the data is stored and protected. Ideally the cloud provider has considered all of the aspects within this article and can provide solutions across different jurisdictions and configurations. Ensure your storage pricing model is compatible with the prices you are paying for cloud storage and activity.

Software providers should consider whether storage should be included within their pricing strategies. Different types of storage could be offered with varying degrees of redundancy and performance. The same goes for data archiving options. Prices can vary based on the storage amount or tiered into storage bands.

Tiering storage plans can be a mechanism to “force” larger organisations into the upper tier Enterprise plans as they are almost always going to require significant storage.

Research your competitor’s storage arrangements. Storage design can be difficult to reverse engineer and your competitor may have a deficiency that you can exploit.

Added value storage-related capabilities

Consider the following storage-related capabilities to add value to your product

• Compression — Compress large files to save your customers time, space and money.
• Encryption — Encrypt data to enhance security and allow your customers to manage passwords and encryption keys for peace of mind.
• Duplicate Detection — Let customers know if they are storing files that are exact duplicates of other stored information. Imagine an employee handbook that gets saved to the desktop of every employee. An initial document that is say 5Mb may blow up into GBs across an organisation that has tens of thousands of employees.
• Index and Classification — Provide automatic indexing and classification services to allow for easier searching and retrieval of information.
• Virus Checking — Virus check uploaded documents and data to prevent the introduction and propagation of computer viruses.
• Stale Information Detection — Alert customers if files such as policy documents are being stored that have a later published version or are now obsolete.
• Policy Surveillance — Alert customers if files are being stored that breach legal or company policies such as those that contain personal data or pornographic material.
• Analytics — Provide customers with data storage analytics. Who is storing the most data? What is the run-rate for increased data storage requirements? What types of data are being stored and for what purpose? How often is data being retrieved and by whom?
• Summarisation — Summarise documents so that customers can determinate whether a particular document is relevant.
• Translation — Translate documents into different languages.
• Cross Reference — Identify other data and documents that may be relevant to the stored document.
• Archive and Retention — Allow customers to design archive and retention policies that are application to specific document types and jurisdictions. Implement effective and efficient archive and retention capabilities.

In summary

• Storage is a significant value creator. Don’t underestimate its importance or undercook the implementation.
• Consider integrating storage as a dimension in your pricing strategy.
• Offer different types and service levels of storage. Some firms and applications will be happy to pay a premium price for a “belt and braces” approach — but not all target customers will have the same appetite.
• Research regulatory requirements in your target market. These are “must do” and will differentiate you from the competition or allow you to charge higher prices.
• Consider archiving services and design them so they can generate a profit in themselves.
• Include storage comparisons in your competitor intelligence efforts.