Integrating Social Media means to open the company and the philosophy of the company at first. The company must allow its employees to use Social Media. Next is to close the security hole when the staff is using Social Media. For example employees can communicate important business information over the web. It’s the same with SaaS or cloud solutions like Dropbox. Employees are able to copy the sensitive data into a Google Docs document or upload it to Dropbox.
Another problem is the shadow IT SaaS can bring into the company. With just the use of a credit card employees are able to use new SaaS or other cloud solutions and use them parallel to the existing IT when they do not get what they expect from the IT-department. It’s the same with mobile devices. Bring your own device is a great idea and on one hand it can save money regarding hardware costs. But a company should ask if it wants that a employee stored the sensitive business data – and if it’s just email – on the hybrid (privat/business) mobile device. The problem is that there is a need for a mobile management system for the devices to control the apps etc. or better virtualization of mobile devices. On the other hand the private data of the employee is stored on the device, like private emails, maybe documents, photos, videos etc. Especially in Germany there is an issue with data privacy laws.
The main challenge integrating SaaS into existing operations is to synchronize the data between different SaaS solutions. It’s the same situation we faced with in early times with the isolated applications. There is a need for a middleware which integrates the cloud services. So at first it seems to be very easy to use SaaS. Create an account, create users, import the data, start to work. For startups or small companies this way works. But if you take a look on mid-sized or big companies the challenges are big.
Actually SaaS is the best way to integrate mobile and Social Media solutions in the existing operations of a company. Today it’s the easiest way to get access from any device and any place to the data, applications and get in touch with people and customers. The problem for the mobile use of SaaS are still the unstable mobile internet connections.
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