How Businesses Can Benefit From SaaS — Understanding Software as a Service (SaaS)
If you’re still fuzzy on exactly what the term “software as a service (SaaS)” entails, it helps to picture the transition that Microsoft Office made in 2011. Prior to that year, you purchased Office on physical media along with a registration key. When Microsoft began to offer Office 365, that was the SaaS alternative to the traditional physical media model. Rather than owning a physical copy of one particular version of the software, the SaaS model has you pay for an annual subscription that grants you access to cloud-hosted software on the publishing company’s computers.
The SaaS Advantage Initially, this seems like it represents an added cost over time, and that can be true in some situations. The SaaS subscription model ensures that users always have access to the latest possible version of the software without having to pay again for a new version, however. To go back to the Office 365 example, subscriptions also offer a range of additional benefits You can access the software from multiple devices with a single login Subscriptions come packed with a substantial amount of cloud storage (business plans come with a minimum of one TB of storage and sharing)
You gain the ability to store work and access it from just about anywhere without having to manually sync files across multiple devices. All of this illustrates the central advantage of any SaaS model for a business: simplicity and reliability.
SaaS products don’t have to be manually upgraded and won’t cause legacy issues down the road for systems that have been adapted to work with them. You also don’t have to deal with the hassle of syncing flies, which is enough of a headache for a lone Individual between their different devices, let alone a team working on a collaborative project across several locations. Got a computer or device that can access the Internet? Then you’ve got access to the latest upgraded and patched version of your software along with all of the most recent versions of your flies.
How SaaS Can Save Money
The previous business costs of licenses, IT Infrastructure and planned downtime for upgrades and patching are traded In for the monthly or yearly subscription fee. When taking all of the possible costs Into account, including the ability to rapidly scale tip or down without having to make physical on-premise infrastructure changes and manual patching and upgrades, SaaS can actually represent significant savings to a company over the long haul. Office 365 is just one very common and familiar example of SaaS. Some others are Word Press, Saiesforce, NetSuite and SurveyMonkey.
