Week 7: Clear - Saas Adoptions

Software as a Service, also known as SaaS, is a software distribution business model where the software being used by the customer is delivered over the internet and is hosted by the vendor on their servers and storage systems.  SaaS is part of the service delivery models used in Cloud Computing.  The other cloud computing service delivery models include Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).   From an enterprise perspective, these cloud computing service models can be very beneficial in several ways, given that the usage is provisioned with a non-disclosure agreement or contract and is approved by your enterprise's leadership and information security organization. Customer benefits of SaaS cloud computing include; near 100% availability and up-time, anywhere access, lower electricity costs, space savings, hardware and software maintenance is handled by the provider, and more time to dedicate to other business projects and processes. 

My current employer, a financial services company, uses various cloud computing vendors for different purposes.  Our email messaging spam engine is Microsoft Forefront for Exchange, hosted "in-the-cloud" with no hardware or software maintenance needs on our end, we only are responsible for our desired spam configurations.  Also, we use a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP), which includes system event log monitoring and management, 24x7 Security Operations Center (SOC), and managed hardware and software for the log collection system.  The events are correlated locally, with the vendor's hardware and software in our data centers, then securely sent "to the cloud" in the MSSP's two Network Operations Centers for monitoring and cloud for monitoring, analysis, and storage.  Using an MSSP has proven to be a time saver, in which we do not have to worry about maintaining the hardware and software of the security monitoring system, plus they are a security subject matter expertise partner.  Both of these cloud computing technologies has enabled our company and employees to focus our time and abilities on other projects and tasks.

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