Posts from ‘SaaS’
Cloud: What is your risk tolerance?
As companies continue to include the cloud in their overall IT initiatives – taking advantage of elasticity, scalability, interoperability and mobility – concerns around management, governance and control of data are preventing some organizations from fully embracing cloud services.
In fact, according to the recent Ponemon cloud survey, over 30% of IT and compliance respondents claim that concerns about data security have kept their organization from adopting cloud services…. And approximately half place a high priority on security when evaluating cloud providers.
For many, the benefits and the desire to migrate to the cloud in organizations seem to outweigh the security concerns.
That being said, every company’s risk tolerance is different. Some of the variables in play that impact risk tolerance certainly include the type of information being moved and stored in the cloud, the industry (and associated compliance requirements) and of not only the company but also its business partners, as well as the specific security measures provided (or not provided) by cloud providers they are considering.
Not all cloud services are created equal. There are absolutely great differences in the measures different providers have taken to protect information they process and store in the cloud. A few security considerations include authentication and authorization as well as protecting data not only while it’s in transit to the cloud, but also while it remains there.
It’s no secret that more and more companies are turning to the cloud to benefit from all that it has to offer. Subscribing to a cloud service can offer conveniences over deploying software on-premises, including faster deployment, budgeting flexibility, built-in elasticity, near-perfect uptime and it can be significantly less taxing on IT resources.
Managed File Transfer (MFT) is certainly not being left behind in this cloud revolution. According to Gartner, adoption of MFT Cloud Services is growing rapidly and now accounts for approximately 10% of the overall MFT market. While both on-premises and cloud markets will continue to grow about 20% annually, cloud services will become a bigger piece of the MFT pie.
Here’s a nifty graph from the Ponemon Institute’s recently published “The Security of Cloud Infrastructure” report summarizing key cloud drivers from the perspective of both IT/Security and Compliance respondents. Interesting to see that many people believe that cloud services will provide improved security and compliance efforts over doing it themselves on-premises with their resource.
So, how do you feel about cloud security? Are you comfortable with your organization’s data being moved into the cloud?? What cloud security measures would make you feel better???
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been putting the final touches on our next generation of services that will be delivered via the cloud. As with any product or service release, there comes a fair amount of planning including ensuring that one has the best site into competitors, forecast and of course customers. We’ve worked closely with industry analysts, our end-users and prospects and our own internal resources to best understand how and where we should position our cloud services. In presentation after presentation and in conversation after conversation, we were presented market slides showing the enormous growth and opportunity within the overall software as a service (SaaS) markets. The natural reaction is to get excited about all the money we can make in this space; before we did, I issued a strong warning to our team:
“In very much the same way that software is analogous to infrastructure, software as a service is not analogous to infrastructure as a service. That includes integration as a service. The profile of the consumer of SaaS will more than likely expect that things like integration, interoperability, transformation and governance will be part of the service subscription.”
In a nutshell what I was saying was… do not look at forecasts for SaaS and assume that the opportunities for IaaS follow the same trends. If users create content by using services that are delivered via the cloud, they have a reasonable expectation that this content can be shared with other services delivered via the cloud (not necessarily by the same vendor). For example, creating content via salesforce.com and sharing that content with gooddata.com should be as simple as granting the necessary permissions. After all, my Facebook, Twitter and Google+ information is shared by clicking a few buttons. Make no mistake, integration and interoperability are nontrivial, but part of the expectation of using cloud services is that the consumer is shielded from these complexities. As more and more cloud service platforms and providers build in integration and governance technologies the need for a separate IaaS provider will likely diminish.
Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that there is a place for technologies such as managed file transfer and business-to-business integration and collaboration; I definitely believe that Ipswitch will play a significant role in the evolution of those markets. Expect the role of Ipswitch to be evolve as well; not only will we provide the best mechanisms for moving content of any size but we will also govern (or let you govern) that movement and the entire experience around it. This is the centerpiece of Ipswitch’s Cloud strategy.
