The .com “revolution” seems a long time ago now, talk of application hosting and the like, all seemed to vanish into thin air with the sounds of the Last Post bidding their farewell to such activities for ever. But never say never! The IT industry does like reinventing itself and the Software as a Service model has very much arisen from the ashes (sorry, couldn’t resist the cricket link here) and is here to stay.
I’ve been very impressed with the quality and capability of some of the SaaS applications in the market today especially in my field of interest, Information Security. It’s such a sensible, pragmatic, approach to resolving an absolute necessity of securing your organisation with such an easy to use methodology.
The take up of Cisco’s ScanSafe service has been excellent, up against some very tough and mature competition, rarely losing out to an appliance solution. The reason I’m sure is because ScanSafe have identified the market requirement very well and have developed a great reporting system in WIRe as well as the best solution available for zero hour threats using their Outbreak Intelligence system, a highly parallelised architecture that adds virtually no latency to the web request. With the additional ability to provide basic data loss prevention protection for web based email management and tamper proof laptop support, it’s a “must have” solution.
Move over Messagelabs is the cry from Mimecast’s unified email solution. As email is now one of the critical applications in any corporate environment, maintaining its availability is a top priority. Once again, Mimecast has taken a good hard look at what matters with securing email both in terms of its availability and its content. The ability to archive emails for a 10 year period whilst making the archive searchable directly from Outlook is a major step forward for usability. No longer is it a question of who makes the decision to archive which emails and when, it can all be done automatically whilst allowing the user to search their Inbox regardless of where the actual email is stored. Goodbye out of control .pst files all over the place. Gone in a flash!
Here is the beauty of the SaaS service. If the Exchange Server becomes unavailable, Mimecast automatically switches the Outlook user to communicate directly with the cloud based service. It’s all transparent, the user having no need to know whether they’re getting a local or remote connection, as long as the email service is still running everyone is happy.
More and more applications are getting the SaaS treatment, but security SaaS solutions are a huge benefit when trying to do things that a company has to do but is not core to their business. The return on investment arguments are generally very compelling but, as always, there will be times when the good old appliance solution still does the job. But their days are numbered, mark my words.
