I don't have the data to back it up, but (for example) data loss as a whole have probably considerably gone down with transitions to SaaS.
Sure you can self-host, but who do you trust more: some guy on your team who has other things to do, or a team that does only that? And a team whose livelyhood depends on uptime/data protection.
Here people can't work, but imagine the amount of work if there was a data failure on your machine? Your example (laptop being stolen) means you probably don't even have access to your data.
in the event of a theft, I can walk into an apple store, purchase an in stock macbook, let time machine recover for ~30 minutes, and get back to work
edit: just to be clear, I bet the vast majority of users will, even after this 24+ hours, experience less net downtime. Nonetheless, when I need to hit a deadline, with installed software, I have a viable plan b. The viable plan b here appears to be to grovel before clients whose deadlines you've blown...
Check out Carbon Copy Cloner [1] if you haven't already. It will create a bootable clone of your drive, with deltas and versions and all that good stuff. During fast-moving projects I usually clone daily. In the event of a drive failure I can simply reboot the Mac from the clone as if nothing happened, cloning back to new internal drive (or machine in case of theft).
good point, maybe the minimum for backups and the like have gotten so good that Toy Story-style "We have lost everything" situations don't really happen as much anymore.
Design tools are definitely a different category than some other enterprise-y software though. At least Evernote still allows me to use it if the servers were down.
I'm sitting in work right now (PC repair shop) and they really really do. We get students coming in the week before thesis deadlines with dead hard drives and no backups of a years work. We get about 2 or 3 people daily coming in asking about replacing a dead hard drive and recovering data.
I recently spilled a little coffee on a MacBook Air. As the screen flickered its last flicks, I zipped up my .ssh directory and put it on Dropbox. Got off the bus, went to the Apple Store...I Was back to work in the time it took to install homebrew.
> Your example (laptop being stolen) means you probably don't even have access to your data.
Err.. what? I confess I've not looked into Adobe too closely, but why would you keep your data (only) on their servers? You'd need backup -- just as you'd have to have backup in place for your personal machines.
A typical scenario is a photographer that edits images -- you have maybe a terabyte of data you need access to, and have backed up, in the day-to-day -- and you need access to editing software.
Also, you seem to misunderstand -- I'm not saying I won't use or pay for SaaS (be that Software or Storage as-a-service) -- I'm saying I want a viable self-host alternative -- where self-host might mean that I can pay someone -- anyone -- to get things up and running quickly if I need it, and not be limited to whatever support any one vendor is willing/able to provide.
Now, personally, I'd probably take self-hostable to mean there's a tested ansible recipe that I can plug into a fresh vps, and be up and running. But not everyone wants to, or knows how to, be their own sysadmin -- but having someone guarantee that, yes, if you need it, this and that company can get you up and running in an hour for $amount.
> Here people can't work, but imagine the amount of work if there was a data failure on your machine? Your example (laptop being stolen) means you probably don't even have access to your data.
Ok, so lets say we're a small team of 5 non-technical designers, and I've lost my laptop. I have yesterdays backup, and my team mates can work. I'll have to spend an hour installing Photoshop on a new macbook pro I went to the store and got. Maybe an hour restoring backups or whatever. Lets say I loose 4 hours of work, and make up 2 in the evening. So we've lost one quarter of a total of 5 work-days today, due to catastrophic failure.
Now consider this outage: the whole team is down, and we've lost (more than) 5 work-days. If there was a viable self-host option, maybe we could've all squeezed in 6 hours of work after throwing dollars at Whomever Inc to set up a fallback solution for us. Also much better than all eggs in one basket.
The other thing is that this outage is affecting whole departments. If you lose your laptop, that's one person out. If the SaaS goes down, all users lose out. In a department heavy with photoshop users, it brings that department to a halt.
Actually, the situation isn't that bad: the outage hasn't affected whole departments, it's affected a whole industry. Which means that your competitors' design departments are just as screwed as yours, so you have nothing to worry about.
What if the SaaS closes? Everyone but the people using non SaaS will be in big trouble, maybe enough to cause bankruptcy if they are very centric as that's all lost too.
Sure you can self-host, but who do you trust more: some guy on your team who has other things to do, or a team that does only that? And a team whose livelyhood depends on uptime/data protection.
I think this is the fundamental fallacy that SaaS companies are promoting.
Objectively, the answer is quite obvious in my experience: self-hosted systems are much more reliable than external ones, as soon as you have a reasonably competent person to run them and a second person with basic competence who can take over in an emergency if the first person is not around.
For a start, one of the most consistently unreliable things in many business environments I've worked in was the Internet connection. Workmen cut through underground cables while they're building the new office block down the road. Someone at your ISP accidentally disconnects you while they're in the cabinet hooking up their new customer. Someone moves in across the street with a badly configured wireless router and screws up the wireless frequency for everyone until the regulatory agency gets someone on-site to track down the problem and make them fix their router a week later. Relying on any Internet-based service for something you need full-time adds one more potential point of failure with a demonstrable risk that it will actually fail from time to time.
That is quite separate to the unfavourable track record of many large cloud/SaaS/PaaS companies, including almost all of the big names, compared to running systems in-house. I was genuinely surprised by some of the comments when GitHub was down the other day, where some people were complaining about not even being able to push changes to production because they were so entangled in dependencies on GH and related on-line services like CI systems that they couldn't extricate themselves.
Sure you can self-host, but who do you trust more: some guy on your team who has other things to do, or a team that does only that? And a team whose livelyhood depends on uptime/data protection.
Here people can't work, but imagine the amount of work if there was a data failure on your machine? Your example (laptop being stolen) means you probably don't even have access to your data.