Comments on: Supporting SaaS Without a “Silver Bullet” Mindset (Part II)

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By: Jeff Ventura

Jeff Ventura — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:13:29 +0000

Hey Khurt. Great comment.

I agree that SaaS is a platform coming of age, but it’s tough to say enterprises are staying away — at least in certain technology silos. Everyone knows about Salesforce.com, the SaaS poster child, but we’re seeing quite a few companies (some very big) move core HR, Financials and Payroll functions to Workday’s technology. (We even use Workday here ourselves. And Salesforce.) And for quite some time, payroll has been outsourced to a SaaS-like model rather than being run entirely in-house.

But the objections you list are entirely valid, and they read basically like a laundry list of SaaS’s enterprise stumbling blocks. These are slowly being overcome or at least mitigated to some extent, but when we hear of a company who won’t go SaaS, it’s often the security and transparency and IP issues that prove to be the obstacles.

Are these getting resolved? Somewhat. Resolution is a sticky word, and what makes one client satisfied will only make another doubt the model further.

It’s a work in progress, but SaaS and the enterprise aren’t the oil-and-water mix they used to be. In fact, we see quite a few who are willing to trade in-house cost, staffing, complexity and resource burden for a bit of security questions and operational opacity. It becomes a management issue and something to always monitor.

Like everything it’s a tradeoff matrix.

Thx again for your comment.

By: Khürt

Khürt — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:16:34 +0000

The security and legal implications ( of cloud computing ( SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS ) is a something with which a lot of large enterprises is struggling. I don’t think that they are looking for a “Silver Bullet” but they are looking for ways to mitigate the increased risk (pushing data over the Internet is arguably more risky that withing one’s own network) of relying on a boiler plate contract that limits their ability to follow already well defined security policies. How are your customers adopting the technology and addressing the lack of transparency (Amazon.com does not allow security audits or scanning), lack of accountability for breaches (read the Amazon.com TOS), lack of jurisdictions over data (where is your data storead?), and data portability (can I quickly move from AWS to Azure)?

Quite frankly the security of cloud services is immature. Until things change large enterprises will stay away.

Read Hoff’s blog:
http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/blog/?tag=cloud-security