Sometimes our clients are surprised to learn that a software or SaaS escrow solution costs more than they initially anticipated. While the costs for software escrow services typically pale in comparison to the software license or SaaS subscription agreement fees they support, there are several factors that contribute to the overall cost of a tier one escrow solution. Each of these factors bring value to the solution.
Professional Errors & Omissions Insurance
The software escrow industry is a small niche industry and as such, there are no SIC codes for our services. Thus, we have to go through a custom underwriting process each year to secure the insurance that protects you and your intellectual property. At PRAXIS we see this as a valuable process that is essentially an audit that benefits PRAXIS and our clients. Each year we disclose great detail on our operations, agreements, processes, services, contractor relationships, facilities and more. Considering that we are insured for two million dollars per occurrence you can bet that our insurance carriers are focused on our business processes and making sure we have implemented best practices. It is worth noting that not all escrow providers take this important step to protect their clients and not all can pass the underwriting process.
Cyber liability Insurance
In addition to Professional E&O coverage, PRAXIS carries Cyber Liability insurance for your added protection. Why is this important? As you may already know, PRAXIS invented the Automated Escrow process back in 2016. Today nearly 100% of all of our escrow deposits are delivered automatically to your escrow deposit account in the PRAXIS data center. While all data is encrypted (in transit and at rest), stored behind our firewall and penetration tests are performed quarterly, we believe it is well worth the investment to make sure our clients have an added layer of protection.
Staff
As with any service business, our staff are the key to your experience! We strive to attract the best, most professional and responsive staff in the industry. We compete with both very large organizations as well as several sole proprietors. We believe that anytime you interact with PRAXIS you will be thrilled with the experience.
Training
Part of having the best staff in the industry includes ongoing training to help our team keep up with the fast moving software and technology space. While we are not experts in software development we are experts in software and technology escrow solutions. We occasionally host webinars on the subject and I have taught Continuing Legal Education (CLE) classes for decades. Technology escrow is a niche industry and most of our clients only encounter technology escrow on occasion. Please rely upon PRAXIS for information on current trends, best practices and options when you have questions.
Compliance
In addition to complying with the requirements of our Professional E&O and Cyber Liability insurance, PRAXIS is also pursuing SOC2 certification for your additional protection and peace of mind.
Facilities
While the vast majority of the escrow deposits we receive are through our Automated Escrow solution we do also maintain a physical media vault facility for our clients that need to store physical materials (i.e. CD’s, DVD’s and other physical materials). Part of the value proposition for the PRAXIS automated solution includes monitoring and reporting as well as troubleshooting and repairs.
Innovation
PRAXIS strives to lead our industry in meaningful technology innovations. Most recent, PRAXIS invented Automated Escrow to dramatically improve the quality and value of the escrow solution. Simply put, agile development processes (i.e. rapid development and deployment of source code level changes in software and SaaS applications) has made traditional escrow depositing processes such as FTP or shipping CD’s / DVD’s nearly obsolete. These methods cannot keep up with the pace of change and place a tremendous burden on those software developers that try in earnest to maintain compliance. With PRAXIS, our clients simply connect their repositories and forget about it! PRAXIS’ engineers monitor their account and notify the Depositor if their attention is needed to reconnect a repository or perform some other maintenance task.
Technology Services
Unlike most software and SaaS escrow providers, PRAXIS has partnered with a managed services provider to dramatically extend our capabilities. In addition to traditional escrow and storage services PRAXIS provides full application continuity services, software testing, data storage, code review and other technology based services.
The good news is that all of these factors contribute directly to the quality of the services you receive, protections for your intellectual property and peace of mind for your clients.