Response to Jay Heiser from Gartner's "Why I’m ambiguous about SaaS email"
Friday, July 16, 2010 at 1:50PM
I just read Jay Heiser from Gartner's "Why I’m ambiguous about SaaS email" post. He brings up some interesting points in his posting, especially with regards the suitability of existing security standards and certifications to evaluate vendors utilising what is a fairly new and evolving delivery model.
The work by Cloud Security Alliance and Cloud Audit are making good progress in delivering a set of recommended controls specific for the cloud, along with a mechanism for third-party evaluation of conformance but in the mean time customers just have to exercise caveat emptor on a case-by-case basis.
Customer due diligence is the key in choosing to outsource your email to a third-party, but this due diligence has to take into account what you actually do on-premise as a baseline and not have some utopian expectation.
I work as the CSO for a leading email management SaaS vendor and I can't tell you the number of 300 - 400 hundred question RFPs we receive from customers who've searched for them on the Internet. On closer inspection of the customer's current solution you find PST files scattered across their network, unencrypted archive databases, countless email and archive administrators, single points of failure and fragmented inconsistent administration across the multiple platforms that form their email infrastructure.
In these instances moving to the cloud is going to instantly deliver improvements over their existing security, but still these customers hold irrational fears because they are nervous about moving their data from a data centre where they can touch and feel the hardware to a service that abstracts it all away. They deliberately build a level of expectation that far exceeds their currently level of security as a mechanism to justify not moving to the cloud.
Security breaches are bad for cloud service providers, they elongate the sales cycle increasing the cost-to-sell; they impact renewal revenue, which is the means of survival for must cloud vendors; and breaches play into the hands of on-premise vendors using FUD to put customers off considering the cloud. Cloud vendors cannot get away with throwing a bunch of hardware and software into a customer data centre and disappearing for three years until the next upgrade is due.
Cloud vendors are judged day-in day-out by the performance, and the security, of their services. Due to this, most cloud providers take considerable effort to ensure their environments, platforms and services are secure.
Not all cloud vendors are created equal however, many aren't true cloud services. They are the latest incarnation of what were application service provider or management service provider platforms, re-purposing on-premise appliances or software by just creating a web front-end to these products which are often ill-suited to run in multi-tenant environments. Customer due diligence must identify these kinds of 'cloud' offerings and the risks that are inherent to these environments (for instance client separation; end-to-end encryption; chains-of-custody of data that may need to be used as evidence at a later date).
Email is a critical business tool, but a commodity, which makes it prime candidate to outsourcing to a cloud provider. Cloud providers will often deliver immediate benefits in security, but potential customers must exercise the appropriate due diligence and weigh the results against their current environments as a baseline. Many customers will find themselves pleasantly surprised by decreased cost, increased functionality and increased security.
The work by Cloud Security Alliance and Cloud Audit are making good progress in delivering a set of recommended controls specific for the cloud, along with a mechanism for third-party evaluation of conformance but in the mean time customers just have to exercise caveat emptor on a case-by-case basis.
Customer due diligence is the key in choosing to outsource your email to a third-party, but this due diligence has to take into account what you actually do on-premise as a baseline and not have some utopian expectation.
I work as the CSO for a leading email management SaaS vendor and I can't tell you the number of 300 - 400 hundred question RFPs we receive from customers who've searched for them on the Internet. On closer inspection of the customer's current solution you find PST files scattered across their network, unencrypted archive databases, countless email and archive administrators, single points of failure and fragmented inconsistent administration across the multiple platforms that form their email infrastructure.
In these instances moving to the cloud is going to instantly deliver improvements over their existing security, but still these customers hold irrational fears because they are nervous about moving their data from a data centre where they can touch and feel the hardware to a service that abstracts it all away. They deliberately build a level of expectation that far exceeds their currently level of security as a mechanism to justify not moving to the cloud.
Security breaches are bad for cloud service providers, they elongate the sales cycle increasing the cost-to-sell; they impact renewal revenue, which is the means of survival for must cloud vendors; and breaches play into the hands of on-premise vendors using FUD to put customers off considering the cloud. Cloud vendors cannot get away with throwing a bunch of hardware and software into a customer data centre and disappearing for three years until the next upgrade is due.
Cloud vendors are judged day-in day-out by the performance, and the security, of their services. Due to this, most cloud providers take considerable effort to ensure their environments, platforms and services are secure.
Not all cloud vendors are created equal however, many aren't true cloud services. They are the latest incarnation of what were application service provider or management service provider platforms, re-purposing on-premise appliances or software by just creating a web front-end to these products which are often ill-suited to run in multi-tenant environments. Customer due diligence must identify these kinds of 'cloud' offerings and the risks that are inherent to these environments (for instance client separation; end-to-end encryption; chains-of-custody of data that may need to be used as evidence at a later date).
Email is a critical business tool, but a commodity, which makes it prime candidate to outsourcing to a cloud provider. Cloud providers will often deliver immediate benefits in security, but potential customers must exercise the appropriate due diligence and weigh the results against their current environments as a baseline. Many customers will find themselves pleasantly surprised by decreased cost, increased functionality and increased security.
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