SaaS Still On the Rise, Despite Down Economy

SaaS (Software as a Service) increasing revenues in a down economy shouldn't be the surprise that Network World seems to indicate in their article. Most organizations see SaaS as a way to take what would have been a large hit to their bottom line and change to a recurring expense hit instead. As Network World rightly indicates, there are some pitfalls to moving to SaaS and longer term implications to the bottom line.

But what does SaaS have to do with the Secure Web Gateway Proxy that we talk about at The Proxy Update? It's important because once an organization decides to use a SaaS vendor that means workers in your organization are going through your proxy to get to the SaaS service. More often than not, these are secure websites, and end-users have to enter their credentials to get access to the SaaS service. This means you need to have SSL interception turned on at the proxy for it to be able to scan the SaaS websites for malware and viruses. At first glance you may think this isn't necessary, but we've written in the past on how well-known websites host malware, so it's especially important to make sure malware doesn't come into your organization from a secure website.

The more applications in the organization move to applications that are SaaS, the more important the role the proxy will play in your network.