The security of the cloud and "software as a service" solutions has been hotly contested in recent years, especially within small tech companies that rely on their business-critical data to remain in operation. Over the past few years, these security and privacy concerns have dwindled, according to a recent report conducted by Gartner.
"Initial concerns about security, response time and service availability have diminished for many organizations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become more widespread," said Charles Eschinger, research vice president at Gartner.
Demand for SaaS continuing to grow
Today's business world is often a copycat environment; when companies see how other firms are improving their productivity with new technology, they aren't too far behind in the adoption of the solutions. This appears to be the case with SaaS with the survey demonstrating 77 percent of respondents said they are expecting to increase investments in SaaS, while only 17 percent will maintain their current level of spending.
"Seeing such high intent to increase spending isn't a huge surprise as the adoption of the on-demand deployment model has grown for more than a decade, but its popularity has increased significantly within the past five years," said Eschinger.
Despite the growth in popularity surrounding SaaS and other virtualized solutions, owners at small tech firms still need to protect their data with cyberliability insurance policies. With these safeguards in place, enterprises cannot be held liable in case their business-critical information becomes compromised by a form of cybercrime.
Firms must choose what processes to move to SaaS environments
According to the research, businesses are using SaaS for their customer relationship management and enterprise content management for their new deployments, while some of the applications firms are beginning to use include supply chain management, web conferencing and teaming platforms.
"The decision to deploy SaaS-based applications within an enterprise is dependent on the business-criticality of the solution, as well as geography, business agility, usage scenario and IT architecture," said Eschinger. "Few organizations will completely migrate to SaaS."
Using SaaS undoubtedly improve collaboration within a company when completing projects, however, businesses must make informed decisions on what processes they planning transition to SaaS environments.