Cloud computing is becoming a part of daily business life - trickling down from large to medium and small-scale businesses. Cloud service providers are upping the ante with different ranges of services, customizing as much as possible to better serve their clients.
As a newbie in Cloud computing, the best way to dip your toe into it is through Software as a Service or as a SaaS model. Basically, the service provider provides the software and data hosting to users and they access these applications through the Internet. This type of service is usually paid for on a subscription basis.
What’s Good About SaaS?
Buying software is not cheap, especially for a small enterprise. SaaS solves this problem as you’re not buying for the use of the application, instead, you subscribe to it. And if you are not going to use it for a couple of months or grow out of it, there’s no wasted money, simply unsubscribe. Subscription does not tie you down money wise, so there’s no wasteful cost. Another cost that SaaS saves users big bucks is doing away with the necessity of upgrading your hardware just to be able to use the software, even when it is upgraded. It also means less in overhead costs on IT services.
Since SaaS model is cloud-based, your existing hardware is not a problem. This is also connected to its accessibility as the app can be accessed via the internet, using your existing hardware or even mobile devices to access information wherever and whenever you need it. The SaaS model of services has the capacity to change in size or scale when you need it. Scalability is one of the major good points of Cloud computing services. You can adapt your subscription to how many users and increase or decrease as you need to, with no fuss and no questions asked.
Lastly, there is virtually no downtime because service providers have backup data centers that easily take over when the main server encounters a problem. When on-premise software goes down, the backup will take a while to pick up the service. But in SaaS models, this is not a problem as the backup system is hooked in automatically and end users won’t even know that the main server is down.
One thing that bothers users of Cloud computing service is the security measures. But with SaaS models, security is not too much of a problem as most applications are not security sensitive such as CRM and HR software.
SaaS provides advantages to small and medium businesses that were once only available to larger enterprises. Now entrepreneurs can focus more on the important tasks of growing their businesses and leave time-consuming duties to automation via SaaS.