Securing the Virtual Environment: How to Defend the Enterprise Against Attack, Included DVD

Chapter 9

Abusing Software as a Service

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

— Israel Zangwill

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a fast-moving and fast-growth sector of the IT industry. When markets were down after the infamous dot-com crash, the managed services industry was one of the first to recover and grow through delivery of software. This was perhaps a normal reaction after a steep market correction that left those with large amounts of depreciation in a tough position to compete. The recognition of the need for a more agile development option was timed perfectly with the emergence of a managed service provider industry and a recession. Why take on the risk of building infrastructure when the option to lease or rent (immediate availability and pay-as-you-go) was available from sprawling infrastructure providers in need of a service to sell and fill their datacenters?

Analyst firms predict continued SaaS sales growth for years to come. A Zinnov study suggests that the cloud market will reach $70 billion by 2015, creating more than 300,000 new jobs in India¹ from just the $650 million local SaaS market.² International Data Corporation (IDC) pointed out in 2009 and 2010 that IT cloud services are growing 26 percent annually. This is six times more than on-premises IT and was the key driver of growth.³ IDC adapted its study to the National Institute ...