ASPs require that they provide twenty-four-by-seven access to their partners and clients. That makes them the Internet equivalent of "sitting ducks".
ASPs tend to cater to small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), who find that it makes sense to outsource their business application to cut expenditure, and allow them to concentrate on their core competency (business) rather than on technology.
For an ASP to host and manage an SME application requires a good degree of trust from the client, and the majority of SMEs are concerned with the confidentiality of their data, as well as the performance of their application.
ASPs potentially also run into problems that tend to complicate the picture, issues like preventing competing clients from accessing each others data, which may reside on the same ASP.
Hee Keen Keong is the consulting director for Computer Associates' (CA) branch in Malaysia, and currently spearheads the CA eBusiness Security arm for Asia.
Keen has extensive experience working with ASPs on behalf of CA, and has had the chance to understand the ASP-end of business better.
"An ASP is like a bank," says Keen, who acts in an advisory role in Internet banking projects for several banks. "You're not only hosting the application, but also the data."
"You don't want competing customers to be able to access each others' data," he pointed out.
What is particular in ASPs are the concepts for authorization and encryption, says Keen, citing that many SME customers need to know that their data access must be secure.
