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.

Yesterday Conformity and TriCipher announced the integration of myOneLogin with the Conformity SaaS management solution.

Combining Conformity’s SaaS management and automated provisioning with myOneLogin Secure Single Sign-on creates a compelling solution for businesses that rely on SaaS.

But the story highlights something even bigger—the expanding ecosystem of solutions that help businesses manage SaaS with the same levels of security, control and governance that they had with internal applications.

SaaS has come of age in the business world, and a new ecosystem is developing around it to help businesses manage and integrate SaaS into their operations. TriCipher and Conformity are both part of that growing ecosystem, and by combining forces we strengthen and expand the options available to companies relying on SaaS applications.

We’ve posted a new customer story about Spence-Chapin, an adoption agency that’s been in operation for a hundred years, and their use of SaaS and myOneLogin. You can find the story at http://www.myOneLogin.com/Downloads/Spence-Chapin_story.pdf.

What I love about this story is how this new SaaS model is enabling and empowering an established and trusted adoption services agency to achieve its core mission most effectively. Sure, the story is about technologies and Internet identity, but all in support of the most basic mission of finding loving homes for children.

Nonprofits like Spence-Chapin often face unique challenges. At Spence-Chapin, for example, the IT department has to support social workers who, by their very nature, are focused on families, not technologies. They need to connect to various applications to do their work – including order medications for children – from locations around the world. And myOneLogin makes this process easy for them.

Do you know of other not-for-profit organizations undertaking the move to SaaS? If so, let us know.