It’s the time of the year to make predictions and top 10 lists for the coming year. So, we’re going to make an easy one – SaaS will continue to gain widespread adoption from business of all sizes. And Google Apps in particular will continue to make headway – although we suspect that a bevy of innovative competitors will make themselves known as well.

We’re not really sticking our necks out here.  Gartner put Cloud Computing at the top of its ‘Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010‘ list. Everyone is calling for 2010 to be the year of SaaS and cloud computing – except for those who particularly enjoy being naysayers.

In talking to customers, we are finding that one major obstacle in the road to SaaS is the concern about security.  In general, we think that companies like Google and Salesforce can probably do a better job securing and protecting their data than the average organization. They have resources to apply to the problem, and their businesses depend on their ability to secure customer data.

So most of the security concerns are probably overstated. However, access security is something that falls outside of the SaaS solution, and is in general the weakest point. 2009 saw several password-based attacks. Twitter was the target of several high-profile attacks – most recently, someone apparently exploited poor password procedures for the service hosting Twitter’s DNS to redirect users to a malicious site. Ouch.

So, if 2010 is the year SaaS becomes mainstream, it must also be the year that businesses everywhere get serious about protecting SaaS access with strong authentication. We hope that’s true – that this year we start shutting down the password-based attacks against businesses and everyone can feel a little more secure using SaaS applications to run their businesses.

Happy New Year to all.

Tags: cloud computing, Gartner, Google Apps, passwords, SaaS, strong authentication, Twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 2:21 pm and is filed under General, myOneLogin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.