Kyong An (pictured) is director of consulting services for Palerra, a cloud security automation provider based in Santa Clara, Calif. He has more than 20 years of consulting services experience.

It’s apparent that an increasing number of enterprises are expanding their footprints into cloud services by shifting infrastructure, applications and data into hosted environments. Countless SaaS offerings are available, and signing up is as easy as supplying an email address and a credit card.

For example, Salesforce runs CRM for massive organizations with billions of dollars in revenue and requires just a few clicks for registration. And Box.com allows customers to share all the data they desire with colleagues and all the data they don’t want to share with anyone who can access their accounts.

Here’s where channel partners can get in on the action: by providing professional services. Historically, large software companies maintained their own professional services organizations to deploy, configure and customize their software. Those deployments could take several months or even years to customize and put into operation. In comparison, SaaS is much quicker at implementation than these traditional deployments. So the question becomes; Why should SaaS vendors provide professional services, and why are they essential for organizations?

Here are six reasons:

Complexity. Some features in complex SaaS solutions may provide functionality that overlaps with existing services. Professional services help companies optimize these service offerings, solving the problem of overlap. Would it be better to consolidate functionality, delivered as a comprehensive solution via SaaS? Or is there value in keeping ad-hoc solutions currently in use? Will any functionality be lost in transitioning to the comprehensive SaaS solution? What’s the business value of each option? Professional services help answer these pressing questions and more.

Criticality Of Data. Securing data through preventative controls such as encryption, access controls, security configurations and detective controls is critical in protecting an enterprise’s intellectual property and regulatory mandates. Professional services help secure configurations of the SaaS offering to match business regulations. So, in this domain, professional services are invaluable to companies since simply providing a credit card and email address to use a SaaS solution isn’t adequate in providing the understanding and expertise needed to protect data.

Compliance. Many controls can be modified with administrative entitlements that affect regulatory compliance. Since hardware can be software (IaaS) and cloud services can be administered by non-IT users in business units, such as sales and marketing, it’s critical to understand how cloud services can be misconfigured and misused. Setting and enforcing policy is not only an information security function, it must also be implemented by non-technical users in many cases. Defining those configurations and best practices requires expertise in the business, as well as cloud services, information security and IT governance. Configuration changes, when done incorrectly, can result in loss of data, breaches of regulatory compliance, and damage to business and customer relationships.