Say you’re planning a party. Sometimes you want control of all the little details, sometimes you just want to book an event room and, a caterer, and an organizer and let them do the work.

The same considerations you’d take into account when deciding on where to host a party hold true when deciding whether to buy engineering software or subscribe to via a hosted or cloud-based service.

Call it what you will, software-as-a-service, point-to-point, hosted, or cloud-based, more companies are offering to do the heavy behind-the-scenes lifting by hosting engineering software that they make available through subscription.

Because these tools are hosted in the cloud they don’t slow down over time, as can happen when software is hosted locally. And they free information technology staffs’ time to maintain onsite engineering and manufacturing software and hardware.

Another big plus, they allow engineers to work remotely, as the tools are always available on the hosting company’s server. As long as engineers have proper client identification, they can tap into the tools from anywhere.

But opinions do vary on hosted software security.

Managed-serve provider EpiGrid of Gainsville, Ga., recently expanded its hosted product data management tool for SolidWorks users. It now offers desktop as a service, CAD in the cloud, and infrastructure as a service as hosted services.

CAD as a service is fairly self-explanatory. An engineering and manufacturing company’s SolidWorks CAD software is hosted, maintained, and updated by EpiGrid on its servers and available to clients who pay a monthly fee to access the software and store the designs they’ve created at the site.

The infrastructure piece provides hosting and application management services, including the SolidWork systems. It places CAD workstations and PDM servers in the cloud while the virtual desktop offers engineers a place to work on and with those tools.

Quality Plus Manufacturing, which makes farm equipment that processes seed and fertilizer, recently implemented the EpiGrid hosted tools. The software reduces IT headaches and increased engineering software performance, as in-house staff no longer needed to update and maintain the software said Dan Forsyth, Quality Plus Manufacturing president.

“We were faced with very slow performance on large file assemblies and our engineers couldn’t work remotely as needed,” Forsyth said in a statement. “IT issues, delays, and excessive server upkeep and maintenance costs were also eroding our budgets.

“After implementing EpiGrid’s solutions, we changed the way we work. We have seen a dramatic improvement in efficiency, productivity, and capacity to create new designs,” he added.

For cloud-based services of all types, security can be a sticking point, depending on whom you ask.

While hosted solutions like these can take security matters out of an IT managers’ hands, they also take security control from them, said Donald Hasson, director of product management at Bomgar, which makes remote support software.

“When you own a solution and it’s inside your network it’s dedicated to you and you don’t have potential for others’ mishaps to affect yours,” he said. “You own it, it’s there and in your control.

“These cloud-based tools, if they’re not secure, account for a majority of where hackers are coming in,” he said.

He recommends IT managers consider keeping the most applications central to their enterprises within their data center and behind their firewall.

 But Gil Zimmermann counters that—at many enterprises—insider access is the biggest threat to enterprise security. He’s chief executive officer at CloudLock, a cloud data-security provider.

When enterprises do house data in the cloud, Zimmermann recommends IT managers know who’s accessing that enterprise data. He uses the analogy of banking information.

“Most customers don’t spend a lot of time questioning their bank about what they’re doing to protect their safe and deposit boxes; they’re more concerned who has access to the credit or debit card number linked to their account what they’re doing with the access to the account,” he said.

He suggests engineering companies investigate software that allows IT managers to see which employees have access to data. These systems also allow mangers to report on access levels for regulatory compliance and for internal and external reports.

Such software can be set to alert IT managers when information is exposed to unverified users or when access needs to be allowed for someone else within the enterprise or denied to an employee who previously had access, he added.

So, like party planning, software planning and hosting takes some time and effort, but the savings (in costs and headaches) can be well worth it.