Analyst conferences promise to be engaging, enlightening and actionable. I’m pleased to report that Forrester’s recent IT Forum 2010 in Las Vegas met those expectations. There was a wide range of sessions for various roles including CIOs, enterprise architects, application development professionals and technology marketers. The event’s core themes appeared to be cloud-based computing, community and social computing, and using technology to become more customer-centric.

There’s no doubt that cloud-based computing, including software-as-a-service, will continue to grow in popularity. Solutions in the public cloud have relatively low start-up costs, are available on-demand and are highly scalable. The conference offered insights for developing private clouds to operate proprietary applications. This trend is inevitable but will require years for organizations to develop clouds that match the level of accessibility, security, support and performance offered by public ones. This is due to the singular focus of cloud-based vendors on these operational parameters. Although large organizations will continue to use solutions in public clouds, they will bring their own applications to private clouds.

What can be inferred from this headline that an IT trade publication recently ran about a study conducted by Microsoft and Indiana University: “SaaS Apps May Leak Data Even When Encrypted, Study Says”?

1. There was a study conducted on SaaS apps leaking data.
2. The study stated that SaaS apps leak data.
3. The study says SaaS apps do not sufficiently protect data.                      
4. A combination of options one, two and three.
5. The study primarily pinpointed security threats to misconfigured Web applications depending on data they process.

There are many business processes where the secure sharing of information across enterprises is required. Examples of these processes include strategic transactions, such as acquiring or divesting an organization, setting up sites for pharmaceutics clinical trials, managing contractor bids to develop an oil exploration project, and syndicating debt between multiple parties across the globe.

No enterprise today can afford to ignore the compelling benefits of cloud-based computing and the SaaS delivery model it enables. Yet CIOs continue to be reluctant (justifiably in some cases) to entrust critical data and business processes to cloud-based systems. In fact, these concerns over security and reliability are widely cited as the biggest inhibitors to widespread enterprise adoption of cloud computing, even as businesses are increasingly reliant on cloud collaboration services for e-mail and other office communication needs.

The question is: Are these security fears really warranted?

For business with some of the toughest security requirements in the world, there are a number of criteria to consider when evaluating potential vendors in the cloud.

Gartner recently announced their picks for the top 10 technology trends of 2010. These trends signify the strategic technologies with potential to have significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Top among these technologies is cloud computing, a technology delivery and consumption model for IT resources and services that is enabled by the internet, with "Software as a Service" as one of the major components of this new paradigm.