Internet economy will grow to many trillions of dollars in the next five years. To share in this potential goldmine, companies must be in the market, regardless of just how nebulous and ill-defined it may be at the present time. Hence, we see a number of different approaches to the use of the Internet by these players. One such approach centres on remote hosting of applications and data. However, there are a number of other issues that, at present, also act as constraints to the ASP model.
Security is quoted as the major concern.
Certainly, the idea of mission-critical applications and data being remote to the enterprise, however secure vendors' claim their data centres to be, causes nervousness amongst both the IT department and senior management. Speed is of course a major issue, both in terms of data access and running remote applications. Unless response times match those of internal applications, it is unlikely that the true ASP model will be attractive. Another concern is that of vendor stability. Most IT managers, faced with these questions will do the obvious thing and keep their applications and data in-house.