A website outage at a SaaS company has started a debate on whether the model is secure.

Salesforce.com users experienced a downtime from 20:39 to 21:17 on January 6th, leaving many unable to use the firm’s applications.

While some said that this highlighted the weakness in the SaaS philosophy, that ultimate control over content is out of the user’s hands.

However, others said that it was preferable, as it meant experienced engineers would be on hand to fix the problem and the responsibility would not be with the users.

But Steve Moyle, chief technology officer at security company Secerno, told vnunet.com that the security of Salesforce.com’s users’ data was paramount to the issue.

‘Almost a million users who have outsourced a mission critical business function are paralysed and not able to access their own customer data, weakening their trust in the system,’ he said.

‘Data owners must ensure that all of their data is fully protected and controlled to the point that no inappropriate use of the data can occur.’

For more information, go to www.webserviceguard.com.