SaaS Security: The Sensible Solution
Industry analysts and their numbers might not all agree, but the impressive growth opportunity in the SaaS market is an easy call.
SaaS Limitations
But there are limitations to SaaS offerings. First, there are regulatory concerns: some banking and financial-services regulations require that banking information remain in a specific location,
making cloud storage and security a complicated issue. Second, Gartner’s survey of IT decision makers found that most enterprises are comfortable with SaaS solutions for sensitive data, but not
what they call “mission-critical” data.
“These results make sense, given that sharing data with a partner almost certainly means that one or more of its employees will be accessing the data, while in an SaaS scenario the data is
typically only accessible to the primary customer,” said Jay Heiser, research vice president at Gartner. “This year we asked about both data availability and data confidentiality policies. Survey
respondents indicated 10 percent less willingness to place mission-critical data into an SaaS offering than to place sensitive data into it. They were even less willing to place mission-critical
data into outsourced data centers, with over one-third of respondents saying that they do not allow it.”
Security as a Service remains one of the strongest and hottest segments in the ComIT space. Smart offerings will continue to carefully consider the specific security needs of a given vertical
market, and, even more importantly, the risk-management mindset of an organization. As the entire economy digitizes, scalable, affordable security will continue to be a need. SaaS is poised to be
a one-size-fits-most solution that will help business IT managers sleep a little easier.
