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  • 1.  SaaS and Cloud Essential Characteristics

    Posted Nov 16, 2020 11:32:00 AM

    Hello CCSK Community,

    How do Cloud Essential Characteristics vary or apply to various Service Models? Especially to SaaS.

    SaaS doesn't need to have PaaS or IaaS in the backend to be categorized as SaaS. (CCSK training).

    Many vendors claim themselves as Cloud SaaS however wouldn't be adhering to rapid elasticity or broad network access or even on-demand self service characteristics. 

    Simple control like IP Whitelisting feature, password complexity, account lock out feature, etc. vary from vendor to vendor and most like to call themselves SaaS.

    How do assess such vendors and differentiate between real SaaS vendors and wanna-be SaaS vendors?

    Best Regards,

    Hirak



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    Hirak Patel
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  • 2.  RE: SaaS and Cloud Essential Characteristics

    Posted Nov 23, 2020 10:21:00 AM
    This would be a maturity piece, some SaaS vendors literally deploy to custom hardware, others deploy on top of an IaaS/PaaS, but do not have an automated backend that allows them to scale up and down automatically. An exam0ple of extreme maturity would be Netflix, they predict traffic going out a few minutes and scale up and down in advance https://netflixtechblog.com/scryer-netflixs-predictive-auto-scaling-engine-a3f8fc922270  

    Asking the SaaS vendor if they auto scale, how they auto scale, and so on is one approach, another approach is to monitor the service yourself, e.g. I have used SaaS providers that clearly have scaling problems as the service worked poorly during daytime hours (heavy usage) but was fine at night, we ended up dropping them and moving to another provider that clearly was better at scaling. 

    As for security features the STAR registry https://star.watch/ is a great way to comparison shop at higher levels, efficiently and quickly.

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    Kurt Seifried
    Chief Blockchain Officer and Director of Special Projects
    Cloud Security Alliance
    [email protected]
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