n The SaaS vendor can suspend your right and license to use services, or terminate
the agreement in its entirety, for any reason or no reason, at its discretion at any time,
with, at most, 60 days’ notice.
n In the event of a suspension of service, the SaaS provider will not intentionally erase your
data (but will not represent that it will preserve it) and can condition return of your data upon
your compliance with terms and conditions that the SaaS provider may establish in the future.
and other contract details, say
Wander and other I T executives. The
business must be fully engaged in
the technology acquisition process,
and the organization must follow
best practices that are well thought
out — from the initial request for
information to integration, ongoing
management and contract renewal.
Computerworld talked with
several organizations about the
challenges they face in scaling up
with SaaS and other cloud services,
why the technology still isn’t the
best fit for some applications or business requirements, and why they
decided to sign on — or walk away.
n Your access to services may be suspended without notice, and the SaaS vendor
will have no liability with regard to such downtime.
n You bear sole responsibility for adequate security, protection and backup
of your data, even though the other party is hosting it.
n The contract terms can be changed at any time by the SaaS vendor.
n Your company must indemnify the SaaS provider from all claims relating to
your use of the vendor’s services, with no limitations on liability.
SourCe: MorriSon & FoerS Ter
One of the two is Workday’s human resource management suite. Guardian wasn’t ready to reveal the other, but
at the Atmosphere conference last fall, Google announced
that it had signed Guardian as a Google Apps customer.
There’s no cloud agenda at work here, says Wander.
Each service has earned its seat at the table by undergoing a rigorous technology acquisition process that has
been updated to include considerations unique to SaaS
and other cloud services. Each service has also passed
through a collaborative review process that involved the
legal, security and sourcing groups in addition to IT.
“We don’t do anything because it’s cloud. But if the
financials look right, if the risk profile looks right, if
the richness and robustness look right, we go with that
solution,” says Wander.
The sheer breadth of Guardian’s move to the cloud
puts the company on the leading edge among Fortune
250 organizations. The extent of its commitment to cloud
services is also changing the business’s I T infrastructure
and redefining roles in the IT organization.
As more corporate infrastructure moves to SaaS, it’s
important for organizations to build a strong foundation
of best practices to manage risks around security, uptime
guarantees, compliance, limitations of liability, remedies
Leading by Example
Wander “is a real leader,” says Robert
McNeill, vice president of research
at HFS Research. In many organizations, he says, SaaS “happens” to
CIOs as business units bypass I T.
“What’s interesting is that he is using
SaaS in IT — an area that he controls.
He is embracing SaaS as a way of
changing the business,” says McNeill.
But Wander isn’t alone in his
thinking. The number of SaaS imple-
mentations is climbing in other enter-
prises, says McNeill. He adds, “We’re
seeing global implementations of
cloud services across the very largest
of organizations,” including even core
enterprise applications to some extent. McNeill sees the
use of horizontal SaaS applications globally or across large
swaths of the corporate user base as a key trend.
That view is backed up by research from Gartner.
The overall market for SaaS-delivered enterprise applications will increase from $9.97 billion to $23 billion by
2015, representing a compound annual growth rate of
17.9%, according to a November 2011 Gartner report.
Cindy McKenzie, senior vice president of enterprise
application services at Fox Entertainment Group, has
also moved aggressively into the cloud. Transferring 11
shared services applications, ranging from recruiting to
tax reporting, over to SaaS providers was “the riskiest
business decision I have made in the last 18 months,” she
says. The global SaaS deployments, which host personally
identifiable information and other sensitive data, “pushed
information security, audit and legal [departments] past
their comfort zones,” but allowed the business to get
strategic initiatives up and running more quickly and at a
lower cost than on-premises alternatives, says McKenzie.
This year, Fox plans to move more corporate applications to the public cloud, including payroll and
HR. The new system is easier to use than the existing
