1) At a minimum, every SaaS vendor should engage the “good guys” by hiring a team of “good guy” hackers to perform penetration testing. There are several firms (sometimes called “white hat hacker” firms) that for a fee they will attack your system and give you an audit report of the results. At LucidEra, we have hired firms like this and set up a clone of our production environment for them to attack (with dummy data, so no real customer data will be compromised), and then we make the audit report available.

2) There is a trend with traditional software vendors to take their software and host it so they can take part in the trend towards on-demand software. The problem is that their software was designed to have the kind of security that’s appropriate for software that is going to be installed in a customer’s data center, behind the customer’s firewall. But, the security requirements for software delivered as a service to thousands of separate customers simultaneously are very different and much more stringent. Trying to retrofit on-premise software to make it secure in an on-demand world is very complicated and risky. That’s why at LucidEra we built a brand new Business Intelligence platform from the ground up, and the security requirements that are unique to the SaaS world are core to the design.