SaaS and Cloud Computing are seen as opportunities to beef up security that will grow significantly over the next five years, according to a survey carried out at a London meeting of the CSO Interchange.

CSO Interchange was set up in 2004 to provide a forum for Chief Security Officers at corporations, government agencies and other organisations to exchange ideas, discuss challenges and learn from the real-world experiences of their peers.  The event provides an independent forum for leading CSOs to discuss a wide variety of security issues that affect their organisations and reveal their top-of-mind concerns through interactive surveys.  

The overall theme for the event was “Getting smart: managing business better in the new economics”. The current economic downturn was seen as the greatest risk to organisations today and over 41% listed this as a more significant security risk than more traditional threats to data security.

In his keynote address, Philippe Courtot, Qualys CEO,  talked about the rise of the Cloud Computing model and predicted that security professionals will conclude that the SaaS delivery model is a more effective alternative for securing data than having enterprises encumbered it with themselves.

Some 87% of those surveyed at the event believe that Cloud services will replace enterprise software for mission critical applications within the next five years with 16% even believing this will happen within one year. A healthy 63% had already conducted an initial assessment of the value of Cloud Computing while the rest were now planning to do so. Traditional misconceptions about the security of SaaS are easing with 55% convinced that SaaS makes information easier to secure.