What in the World is SaaS? Top 3 Reasons You Might Need It

[NewsDesk]

SaaS is nothing new! Sorry to get your hopes up for learning about an exciting new technology for your business. The fact is that SaaS has been around for a long time, it's just someone got to the point of slapping a snappy acronym on it.

SaaS stands for "Software as a Service". It simply means rather than buying software which is installed on your computer, you "rent" the software and pay for it like a service. You keep paying for it monthly, quarterly, yearly, or however the provider structures it.

At first that sounds pretty awful right! Why would you want to keep paying for a service when you could just buy a software product and pay once? Well it turns out there are several good reasons.

1. Lower cost of entry - Typically the periodic fee that you pay is structured so that it is much less than the cost of licensing a product on a one time basis. The goal is to make it easy to adopt the service.

2. Built in updates - With SaaS all the product updates are included in your subscription. Contrast this with a typical software product which you might have to pay for upgrades each year to keep current.

3. Better reliability - The story goes that the SaaS provider has invested heavily in infrastructure, and the system is running on top of the line hardware and networks. In other words you don't have to invest in your own infrastructure before you can even install another product.

All that sounds great. But there are potential downsides as well. For instance, depending on the function of your software, you may be putting yourself at the mercy of another company's fortunes or lack there of. It can be a huge cost to migrate away from a SaaS provider if they go under. Other potential issues revolve around privacy concerns in a world where accidents do happen and data does disappear.

We use SaaS applications at our company when it makes sense and refer then to customers at times. All in all they can be a great choice if you understand the downsides.

About the Author

Daniel Burge is the founder the custom software development company Burada, Inc. Burada specializes in developing database systems and high end web applications for businesses around the globe. For more information visit www.buradainc.com/.