Darkside of SaaS?

Link: Web-Tones: Darkside of SaaS?. Carlos Leyva is a deep thinker. He thinks big thoughts, and his blog is full of insight about practicing law in the Internet cloud. I am a shallow thinker. I think about where the next meal is coming from, and how I can use the coolest new gadget to watch baseball. However, we both agree that installing and using law firm essential applications in the Internet cloud (Software As A Service or SaaS ) is a risky proposition. I have a running dialogue going with Larry Port at RocketMatter, which provides an SaaS solution to time and billing for lawyers. I agree wholeheartedly that we are headed to a world where desktop OSes are irrelevant, and all or most applications are Internet based. I think we all need to take a deep breath, and consider the risks before we jump off that cliff, however. I will not take that leap, for mission critical applications, until I am certain that a local desktop fall-back solution is available if the unthinkable happens. I love Web 2.0, and use Internet enabled applications and tools all the time. However, I don't trust my essential stuff to them.

Comments

[Larry Port]

Hi Rick:

I am wondering if we SaaS providers need to do a better job explaining the nuances regarding SaaS and clouds. They are not synonymous. Cloud computing is a very specific type of distributed computing platform that leverages massive amounts of machines. Google and Amazon have recently popularized their own clouds.

A SaaS provider may or may not use a cloud to run their application. They may also instead run dedicated servers that they have complete control over. Look for a blog post explaining these subtleties in detail in the next few weeks.

[Dan]

FL, you are right on for several reasons. As a fiduciary, it is an attorney's duty to protect information, my ears do more than perk up when I read something like Web Worker Daily's comment that one of the "minor catches" at ADrive (50GB online storage) is that "they reserve the right to share metadata about your files with partners."
Timeout. The tech ball moves quickly. You're not concerned about metadata? Six words: please step away from the computer.

[WPS]

One site that is taking an interesting approach to this problem is www.buxfer.com; they provide a personal accounting service.

They're dealing with very sensitive data (bank account logins) so they give users three options. You can save your passwords on their server, which they encrypt. If your uneasy about that, you can type your password in each time you use the service.

But what's interesting is their third alternative: using Google Gears to store users data on the *local* machine. The software then just grabs the data from your computer when necessary, and never stores any passwords server-side.

As internet connections get faster and Google Gears develops further, I think this will become a more popular solution.