Hosted ERPs: the other side

PUNE, INDIA: Security is probably the major concern in regards to using a SaaS ERP.

"Your company’s most valuable information asset: customer, prices, orders and products, are not protected behind your own firewall, but rather accessible through the Internet. As the data travels back and forth from your hosting provider to your users, there is no way for you to monitor what happens. If your hosting provider is hacked, your data is at risk," writes Yossi Ben Haroosh in his blog as Open Source Guru.

For Tushar Mehendele too, who takes IT decisions at Electromech, SaaS is a good concept, but data security issue prevails. "After all, your precious data is now residing on someone else's server. But I feel that a lot of companies are taking care of encryption."

Speaking at the sidelines a STeP-IN Theme Conference on Security Testing, K V Shashi Kiran, VP, Business Development, QSIT, an expert in security consulting and projects also feels that new technologies on cloud pose security challenges, but as adoption and maturity level evolve, the challenges would be sufficiently addressed.

Another concern is on customization. Because hosted ERPs run multiple instances of different companies on a single installation, it makes customization tougher, as the code running the core ERP system is shared between instances.

Talking about Connectivity, Haroosh, who is a business software expert with over 13 years of experience, implementing ERP and PLM applications, working both for application users (in the manufacturing industry) as well as application development (SAP), says, " If your link is down, your business is down. There are things you could do to make things better, such as using 2 different lines from 2 different ISPs, but downtime due to lack of Internet connectivity is inevitable."