A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly gave some interesting insights. "Meeting the cybersecurity challenge" shows that more sophisticated attackers are only one of several reasons for the increased threat. Other reasons are more based on how the nature of the business has evolved with employees expecting flexible access, suppliers and customers being more closely interlinked in supply chain processes, and companies forced to venture out from behind their firewalls to earn their money online.

Therefore, the solution of the problem cannot be expected to come from the IT specialists alone. There are business decisions to be made, e.g. classifying data to see, where the most critical information sits and focus the main efforts there.

We also observed that a paradigm shift is required in many organisations to change data security from being perceived as a purely technical problem to a business problem to be addressed on various levels. Many of the recent high profile security disasters were owed to behavioural rather than technical problems. Whilst security technology is to play a key role and needs to be driven forward, we believe awareness of information security needs to become part of the culture of an organisation - and with probably the majority of CxOs giving away passwords to their PAs or others, there is a long way to go...

We currently find clients confused by the current discussion on Software as a Service (SaaS). Many vendors push their products as being SaaS, provide arbitrary definitions of what SaaS really is, and are guilty of some scaremongering by making clients believe they'll end up in a dead end, if they don't move to SaaS now.

We found a succinct list of 10 points to be expected from a good SaaS solution. Written by Steven John, the CIO of Workday (a major SaaS vendor) it is certainly not unbiased, but as good a starting point as any: 10 critical requirements of cloud applications.

The problem with this list as well as others is: it claims to provide a universal definition of what SaaS should be and then suggests, this is what every organisation needs. This is completely ignoring the fact that business and IT objectives and constraints differ between organisations. Therefore, we believe that it doesn't really matter that much, whether a solution has the 4 characters "SaaS' stamped on or not. As a decision maker you should rather look at what value various solutions provide for your organisation.

Modern SaaS solutions designed for multi-tenancy (many, possibly all clients share one installation of the software) certainly bring advantages in deployment time and ease of upgrade, but traditional ERP vendors may also have advantages like higher flexibility, albeit coming at a cost. We are sure that the SaaS model is going to grow and will gain market share. Understanding both worlds, we also see how traditional ERP vendors struggle to bend their products towards a SaaS model, as they weren't initially designed for it. However, some of these vendors have considerable financial and intellectual fire power, so it can't be said they won't be able to turn the tide.

What is the right solution for your organisation at this point in time, can only be decided by sound analysis, not by listening to the war of sales buzzwords. If you see through the marketing speak, you can very well include vendors offering SaaS and traditional models into your selection process, should your strategy not give a clear direction on this from the outset. Sure, they are more difficult to compare than vendors coming from the same model, but, if you understand both worlds, a sound comparison is still possible.

If you want to discuss these questions further with us, just send a quick note to contact@iprocon.co.uk

And watch this space!

We are committed to helping clients to navigate the buzzword jungle and make sound business decisions - as well as helping them to avoid pitfalls in implementation and upgrade projects - such as the application of traditional delivery models to deploy SaaS solutions, as often seen with traditional integrators, desperate to get their oversized implementation armies busy with the new, lean delivery models designed for SaaS solutions.