age that corporations formerly had in the period prior to the advent of the PC. Microsoft's Terminal Server product and Citrix's Winframe products are leading thin-client application server productsASPs today offer nearly any service a company might need. Many of these services (like email, Web hosting, ad serving, invoicing and bill delivery, payroll, etc.) are said to be “mission critical”. When talking to Bryce Conway, A specialist in ASP at Airborne Express, about businesses using ASPs, he told me that when looking at an ASP for a business, a business should take many precautions about what they are getting into. Here is a set of questions he told me a business should ask any ASP when interested in that ASP’s business: How do customers access the software? Is it through a browser or an application? If it is through a browser, how does the user experience feel? How are customer service issues resolved? If you (or employees) have questions and/or problems with the software, what happens? Does the ASP provide training?How secure is the data? You want to find out about internal security policies with ASP employees, passwords and access reports to protect your employees, firewall and other safeguards against external attack, and things like tape back ups to handle hardware failures. How secure is the connection between the ASP and the user? Data flows between the ASP and the user whenever the user accesses it. Is it secured by encryption, a VPN, proprietary techniques or some other system? How is the application served? Is your data on a dedicated machine or a shared machine? Both techniques are common and you often have a choice (with dedicated service being more expensive). How does the ASP handle redundancy? If a machine fails or an Internet pipe goes down, what levels or redundancy are in place to keep your servers online? How does the ASP handle hardware/software problems? If a hard disk fails or the application ha...
