Business-Led Development- an Extension of the Public Cloud

To understand this headline better we need to have a better understanding of the traditional ways we think about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms and public cloud platforms. The difference lies in the starting point of these two solutions, while SaaS started as an extension of the corporate network, the public cloud started as an extension of the data center.

But just like Microsoft, Salesforce, Servicenow and other major SaaS providers started as a solution or a tool for a single use-case, they grew and became much more than that.

In his latest DarkReading column, Michael Bargury, Zenity’s CTO, explains why we shouldn’t be thinking about SaaS platforms, cloud platforms and No-Code/Low-Code platforms differently. With the exponential growth of business developers (citizen developers), we should be treating No-Code/Low-Code platforms the same way we treat AWS, Azure GCP and other public cloud providers, and focus our security efforts on what is built using these platforms, by whom, how, and what are the associated security risks that come with it. As Michael writes “Thinking about low-code platforms as part of SaaS makes it difficult for us to see that a huge portion of our business applications are now being built by the business, outside of IT and outside of security control. To begin seeing the problem and figuring out our approach to it, we must shift our mindset to acknowledge low-code platforms as a part of the cloud and treat the applications on those platforms like we do any other application”