6 Reasons SaaS May Mean A Return To Silos

Don't want to revisit the bad old days? Here's how to keep application integration on track

Michael Biddick, CEO, Fusion PPT

July 22, 2011

3 Min Read
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Application integration has always been a thorny problem. Add in the inherent design restrictions of software as a service--think islands, not exactly designed to exchange data--and things get even trickier. Fortunately, there are some products and best practices that can make your apps work together.

And make no mistake: Integration is a pressing issue. In our recent InformationWeek Analytics 2011 Enterprise Applications Survey, we found 43% of 314 respondents are using SaaS applications. But when we asked them to rate their satisfaction with nine aspects of these apps, deployment simplicity came out on top--and ease of integrating these services with on-premises systems and data sources landed at the bottom of the list.

So, why are we adopting SaaS at a steady clip if we haven't found a good way to securely link these apps with one another and in-house systems? You'd think IT teams would have learned their lesson, given our sad history with siloed data sets and today's identity management and user access requirements.

We work with a number of CIOs who are determined to create unified IT environments incorporating a mix of platforms and SaaS and in-house applications. We find they run into problems in six key areas:

>> Identity and access orchestration is usually at the top of the list of pain points. The ability to rapidly verify who's accessing your systems is mandatory for security and compliance. With SaaS applications, we find there's a much higher risk of failing to disable access after people leave or to modify permissions as roles change. That's because access is typically a centralized and automated function, using access-control systems with well-established ties into enterprise applications--ties that rarely extend into SaaS provider networks.

>> Compliance reporting is also a challenge. Companies subject to Sarbanes-Oxley, for example, must be able to cull a variety of log information. While most SaaS vendors enable IT to run these reports from within their systems, if you have a number of SaaS apps from different providers, consolidating this data must be done manually. Yet automation is the only way to effectively build compliance reports involving multiple logs.

>> Information silos aren't conducive to business analytics either, and without SaaS integration, reporting capabilities will be limited. As with logs, most SaaS systems are pretty good about reporting within the application, but dynamically analyzing data from multiple services is a whole different story.

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About the Author

Michael Biddick

CEO, Fusion PPT

As CEO of Fusion PPT, Michael Biddick is responsible for overall quality and innovation. Over the past 15 years, Michael has worked with hundreds of government and international commercial organizations, leveraging his unique blend of deep technology experience coupled with business and information management acumen to help clients reduce costs, increase transparency and speed efficient decision making while maintaining quality. Prior to joining Fusion PPT, Michael spent 10 years with a boutique-consulting firm and Booz Allen Hamilton, developing enterprise management solutions. He previously served on the academic staff of the University of Wisconsin Law School as the Director of Information Technology. Michael earned a Master's of Science from Johns Hopkins University and a dual Bachelor's degree in Political Science and History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Michael is also a contributing editor at InformationWeek Magazine and Network Computing Magazine and has published over 50 recent articles on Cloud Computing, Federal CIO Strategy, PMOs and Application Performance Optimization. He holds multiple vendor technical certifications and is a certified ITIL v3 Expert.

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