Since security is always seen as a barrier to adopting software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, I was interested to hear the views last week of long-term Salesforce.com customer CyberSafe, a UK-based security software vendor. CyberSafe has just become the first live customer using CODA 2go, a financials application that operates entirely on Salesforce.com's cloud development platform, Force.com. Normally, companies are supposed to be especially wary of putting their financial data into the shared infrastructure of a cloud provider.
It turns out that trust is the key factor here. CyberSafe has been a Salesforce.com customer since 2003, when it replaced an earlier hosted customer support portal that had offered less functionality for twice the monthly cost. The 20-employee company's satisfaction with Salesforce.com made it eager to become an early user of CODA 2go, the first SaaS accounting package to be developed as a native Force.com application.
"I've been a salesforce customer long enough to know that I do trust them," technical director Tim Alsop told me. This is partly based on the steps Salesforce.com has taken in the past to help safeguard data security, such as introducing the ability to limit logins to certain IP address ranges, which restricts the opportunity for malicious login attempts. "I actually have a lot of confidence in Salesforce.com doing the right thing to protect the data," said Alsop. There's also the confidence that comes from knowing that much larger companies than CyberSafe also rely on the vendor: "I consider salesforce to be the market leader and I know many other customers trust them."
Alsop was also honest enough to acknowledge that the data is probably more secure in Salesforce.com's data center than it has been on CyberSafe's previous Sage accounting software, which runs on a standalone PC at its offices. "In a way it's more secure that it was before, because we know they're doing regular backups and replicating across data centers." The Sage machine "isn't being backed up as often as it ought to be," he admitted.
Bringing the company's financial data onto the same platform as its sales automation and a quote system that CyberSafe developed itself on Force.com brings several benefits. There will be no more of the errors that have sometimes crept in when manually transcribing data from one system to another. Now the system is live, Alsop is reaping the benefits of better reporting and getting more detailed visibility into the profitability of individual customers. "The salesforce platform has very powerful reporting so it's very easy to get all the figures you're looking for," he said.
Perhaps being in the security industry helps Alsop be more pragmatic about weighing the risks and benefits. CyberSafe sells its single sign-on and network security product both to large enterprises and to smaller businesses, mostly SAP customers. So it's aware of the value placed on securing financial and operational data. But it's also aware that security is a matter of balancing risks — especially in today's hyper-connected world. "Being in the security industry I know there's no such thing as perfect security," said Alsop. "The only perfect security is [to have] no wires connecting the systems, but then no can use them."
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