The latest development from French security tools publisher, OpenTrust, highlights an important conceptual shift that occurs with a move to cloud-based delivery – and in particular with Software as a Service. The company has packaged up a couple of its security tools, with more to follow, as a SaaS-delivered service known as TaaS.
This stands for Trust as a Service, which neatly packages up the full concept of what the company is pitching at potential customers. The fundamental need faced by customers with security-related issues is to identify a security partner they can trust, and a service they trust will work efficiently and effectively every time they need it to. And that is something deeper for the user than simply a collection tools that could be labeled as `Security as a Service’. This demonstrates the shift that has occurred with cloud delivery and SaaS in particular – what constitutes the real nature of the service is more than the sum of the software tools used to build it.
How close OpenTrust gets to achieving the status the TaaS label identifies is still an open question of course. The company has so far only introduced two components of the TaaS service. These are its Secure File Transfer tool and its Digital Signature tool. The former provides a secure platform that manages the transfer of confidential data directly from a user’s email box, while the latter provides the basis for creating paperless business processes that still maintain full authentication of the users, traceability of their actions and management issues such as the time stamping of those actions.
The company does have a wide range of security tools available however, as well as packages of tools configured for specific vertical market sectors such as healthcare, public services and financial services. It can be expected that the TaaS approach will grow to include more components from this suite of tools. The cloud will also make a useful delivery method for implementations of the TaaS package tailored to the specific needs of vertical market sectors.
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