With the popularity of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), enterprises will be using cloud-based software for identity and access management (IAM) or identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) to reduce costs and increase security, according to Idan Shoham, chief technology officer at Hitachi ID Systems Inc.
Now companies have separate internal networks apart from the public Internet, but in the near future we will see the convergence in IDaaS. IDaaS will be used to identify users and control what company documents they have access to, according to Andras Cser, analyst at Forrester Research, Inc.
“We should look at cloud as an augmentation of the services we already have,” Cser said.
Workers are increasingly working outside of the office, and SaaS allows easy access to company documents and applications from home.
“The mobile user needs to get into applications that may be accessed by the cloud,” Shoham said. “The workforce is mobile.”
Enterprises may be concerned with using cloud-based software because it is through the internet and no one monitors the large network, according to Cser. Companies would also be dependent on the software providers online.
