Regulatory Compliance - the SaaS way !

Hello Friends,

Today morning when I woke up to the music of my 2 year old daugther - Lasya, and checked my email – I saw a mail from SAP Flash on “SAP Solution Stragey for Year 2010” – It immediately made me recollect all the thoughts which were running in my mind for past few months on “Managing Regulatory Compliance in a SaaS way”. Even in my earlier post – I wrote SAP might start supporting the EH&S / Sustainability in a SaaS way”. I think it would be interesting to post my views (literally my own views – Disclaimer here !) on Regulatory Compliance using SaaS. Here it goes ….

Regulatory Compliance is slowly moving towards the SaaS mode of delivery Model, slowly but surely towards SaaS base !. SaaS has the potential to shape a new era in the life of Regulatory Compliance and Sustainabiity Management and serve as a core structure – and style – that defines corporate sustainability in the long run. Key point would be the the ability to support many variations in regulatory requirements, processes, rules and data without custom code. Definitely there are not many customers in world – who are buidling their own codes to manage their business processes, however this happening in some major players and in some functional areas of new regulatory spaces like REACh. Throughout the world – regulations are evolving rapidly and it takes some more time for these to settle down – name it REACh, GHG Management, Cap & Trade. It takes more for developing world to do business in a SaaS way, again it’s a business opportunity and a threat !. I anticiapte it will take couple of years if not decades to fully realize the benefit of SaaS offering for Regulatory compliance.

But company’s can start investing in this sphere to assess the initial data security. For example, investigating in the deployment of use non-sensitive data, such as MSDS, TremCards and DG Documents, Over time, as familiarity and security in the SaaS grow, complete regulatory compliance including disaster recovery can move to the SaaS. Ultimately the SaaS and the data center will switch roles, with the local data center being the disaster recovery site and the SaaS becoming the production site. The major benefits include massive cost shifts, on demand access, disposal infrastructure and new levels of collaboration - support of the regulatory experts to tackle regulatory requirements right the word go, and opportunity to concentrate on core business needs !.

The major benefit and constraints however is the threat of vanishing Base of Pyramid – Customers– who might vanish in short period of time. Another constraint is data migration in SaaS for geographical roll outs for geographically separate data centers (Need to completely understand the Reservoir Project - Intercloud worlload mobility)! And many companies still need legacy Systems to feed their day to day ERP components – making access to these systems in the SaaS is a necessacity. As it should not be a problem as all major databases still focus on relational data storage, all major relational database products now provide native support for storing, accessing and even querying data in XML format.

Finally, there are already quite a number of EH&S Vendors supporting SaaS model, however the major benefit SAP provides is "Access to an emerging generation of software applications that simply never could have been implemented in the traditional, internally managed model"

I would like to study a bit more on this and share my detailed views from multiple data sharinng, security, and other deployment issues in future post.But it will be an exciting journey ahead for industries to go for a SaaS way

Thanks