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Two Concerns: Control and Trust
For those who remain on the fence or adamantly opposed to SaaS, objections come down to control and trust. But do you have to be in control of all moving parts in your enterprise? And if you choose to cede control, how do you manage, measure and ensure trust?
A midmarket insurance company CIO articulates his concerns about SaaS. "We virtually always want some kind of unique coding to support our business," he explains. "I'm distinguishing between software as a utility (such as Microsoft products) and software that provides business functionality. In the latter case, it would be hard to imagine accepting that the software could not be changed when we need it to support the business."
SaaS isn't a critical business differentiator, he says. "One exception might be something like our SunGard General Ledger software," he adds. "That could be implemented as SaaS, I imagine." And the fact that the software can be updated by the hosting vendor "more or less at any time" is also a concern. "I want much more explicit control over when new software is rolled out," he says. "I would have to understand much better how this works in order to trust the vendor well enough to agree to that concept."
As a customer of Salesforce.com's CRM product, the senior security officer at a global investment banking firm shares this perspective. "SaaS is causing us quite a bit of grief. It doesn't neatly fit into existing models and is often misunderstood by the business," he notes. "The amount of effort we have put into managing usage and administration of Salesforce.com is only surpassed by the effort [our] audit [department] sees as necessary."
The business side fails to take into account the custodial role of IT professionals in SaaS arrangements, he adds. Vendors often overstate the flexibility of their offerings, and most "sell against the tyranny of IT," he notes. "That doesn't lend itself to friendly conversations."
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