Five Reasons SaaS doesn't suck

Sending your company's critical applications into the cloud is not for the faint of heart. The risk and rewards used to choose on premises software in the past are greatly exaggerated when choosing a SaaS application. As with any business decision, if you understand the risks and can take advantage of the rewards then cloud computing is for you. The article below addresses the concerns of consumers of cloud applications who did not understand the risks.

Here's the Facetious CIO's response to each of the Five Reasons SaaS sucks:

1. "My Internet connection sucks!" Not understanding that your connection to the Internet becomes a critical extension of your core network is dangerous. When entering into cloud computing your environment changes. Analyze what it takes to deliver that application and secure the underlying technologies (some you still own even in a SaaS world) to match or exceed your applications' SLAs.

2. "I don't trust the Internet..." And rightly so. Given recent high profile security breeches you should be wary of the information placed on the Internet, who has access to it, and most importantly what you are using to authorize access to it. Security breeches so far have been due to poor password management. Your application and data are now available on the Internet instead of behind your firewall. Please use something more restrictive than a username and password.

3. "I always forget to hit the 'save' button." I fail to see how this is any different from on premises solutions. Sorry, but if your users couldn't figure this out with local applications than it won't be any easier with an application hosted elsewhere.

4. "I don't understand why (insert SaaS app here) can't just (insert desirable feature here)" Again, this does not change between the on premises and cloud worlds. If you do not correctly set expectations up front your implementation will fail. This holds true if you buy a product off the shelf, develop it in house, or rent it from the cloud.

5. "What do you mean ten years from now I'll still be paying for this thing?" Yup, it's true. Unless you plan on keeping your current on premises system at its current version for the next ten years, it's less expensive and hassle free to just rent it. Software, even mission critical software, can barely be considered an asset to your company. Buy a building and add it to your company assets, rent the software.