In spite of the cost advantages offered by SaaS, enterprise customers are still reluctant to embrace this technology. Security and privacy are touted as biggest reasons for such a reluctance. Enterprises gets edgy as soon as we talk about stuff outside of their firewall. This lack of trust also shows up in the infrastructure space and some companies have adopted private clouds as a short term solution. Private clouds gives them a chance to have Cloud like architecture inside of their firewall. Slowly SaaS vendors are also taking steps to deliver the software as a service inside the enterprise firewall. Enterprises are warming up to this trend because it helps them cut costs while still keeping the critical data inside of their firewall.

Longjump, a PaaS provider, announced on Tuesday that their Longjump Business Applications Platform can now be licensed to be installed at the enterprise data centers or by ISVs in their own choice of datacenters. Their platform is available in three deployment configurations fitting the needs of variety of businesses.

• Multi-Tenant – Suitable for large scale enterprises who want to host the software and data of different business units/departments
• Single-Tenant – Ideal for enterprises wanting to host SaaS applications inside their firewall
• On-Demand – Suitable for small businesses who don’t want to invest huge amounts on infrastructure

Enterprises will love such an option because it gives them an opportunity to cut costs drastically in the current economic climate and, also, offers them the same privacy and security comfort level from their on-premise mindset. This will also help them deal with regulatory and compliance issues without much trouble.

Let us be very clear here. It is going to take some time before enterprises get comfortable with SaaS in its current form. Instead of trying to convince enterprise customers to take a giant leap of faith, SaaS vendors can offer options to install SaaS applications inside the enterprise firewall, either in the form of an appliance or as an installable package. This will help enterprises embrace SaaS in their workflow and, eventually, be comfortable with the idea of public cloud or SaaS delivered from outside the firewall.

What do you think? Does it make sense to take this approach or it is a pointless exercise without any substantial advantage. Feel free to add your comments on this topic.