5 Reasons to Consider SaaS for Your Business Applications

Published in

The Startup

5 min readNov 8, 2018

The SaaS business model continues to gain more traction across the globe. Companies of all sizes are now embracing SaaS as the next best alternative to the on-premise hardware and software development.

According to the Computer Economics report, around 60% of all companies have now integrated at least some percentage of SaaS solutions into their business, with nearly 36% aiming to increase their investment in the months to come.

Here are 5 reasons why you should be considering SaaS business model for your business applications.

Flexibility and scalability

If you aim to be successful, you will have to be flexible. If you are a business owner, you will have to be able to adjust to changes in your business and also from other external factors.

SaaS applications enable you to choose the delivery model and easily change it when your business requirement changes. It is way easier to get new users, integrate to other systems and turn on an additional set of components.

You will be able to experiment in a less risky environment by trying on a new project, acquisition or user base. Since your provider manages the back-end with the cloud, you do not have to be concerned about the infrastructure.

Thanks to the flexible subscription-based licensing, SaaS applications scale easily. A scale is required to manage huge amounts of data from various sources.

Ease of use and Speed factor

Selection and deployment of a business application have never been an easy task. Factors such as time and effort stack up, even after the implementation is successful. Cloud applications deploy faster, therefore bringing down the installation and administration efforts.

Having an ability to develop and deploy quickly will let one have a competitive edge and also the ability to speed up the business benefits.

SaaS creates value to its users much faster and also offers companies the flexibility that is needed to bring in change when they need it.

Great and updated features

Having the best features for your business apps can actually make work more interesting and can bring in high productivity among employees. Your team can use new features instantly to make informed business decisions.

As a matter of fact, businesses with traditional applications have to spend heavily for upgrades. With SaaS, businesses are benefitted as these upgrades will be managed by the providers, letting businesses focus on or use new capabilities as and when it is available. The security and functionality are improved as it is done in the background.

Minimizing Application Costs

Bringing down the cost of business applications can benefit everyone, from the CXO to the individual business units, which also includes the IT staff. Businesses are increasingly using a system of chargebacks, wherein the IT charges many business units for the IT services that they consume.

Given the lower infrastructure as well as maintenance costs, SaaS business applications can considerably bring down the percentage of your business unit’s budget that is devoted to IT spending, which also means that you can invest in other areas while still using the latest, fully functional and highly secure business applications.

The subscription-based model not only offers a great flexibility in terms of licensing, but its feature rich apps are also quite easy to use and are custom made for the kind of business role a user has.

In case you want to extend the capabilities of SaaS applications, your IT team can easily do so with the help of some development tools that they are already familiar with, also offered in the subscription model.

This mainly saves time, cost and brings down the investment risk. These additional extensions or features will have automatic upgrades, which means, these applications will continue to function smoothly when the underlying platform or the app is upgraded.

Performance and Time Management

The cloud solution deployment time is way less when compared with the on-premise systems. You can deploy a cloud-based system across many regions, thereby avoiding the cost associated with those rollouts.

No additional hardware is required, which also means that you will not be wasting time in procuring and setting up IT infrastructure and VPN access across numerous sites.

You can add in more number of users as your business expands without thinking about improving the hardware.

Cloud-based applications are built so that the maximum network performance is adaptive to one’s requirement unlike the on-premise setups, where the performance is mainly dependant on the in-house servers.

This also means as and when your business grows, you will certainly outgrow the server’s capacity and will have to additionally purchase and install hardware and even hire and train many more IT employees.

Even though the cloud-based platforms are very cost-effective, you must make sure that the software platform and applications that you are signing up for will certainly work cohesively. Not all SaaS applications integrate with existing on-premise apps or platforms.

With SaaS, service providers are taking all the burden of security, availability, and performance, which means that these systems are a hassle-free, secure option that any business aiming to grow should consider as a necessary improvement.

Conclusion

Companies using Cloud-based apps with the SaaS business model are increasing in number, the reason being, it is based on the subscription model and has numerous benefits.

Age old business applications are now going out of the present IT plans of many businesses. The ability of fast deployment with lower investment risk has made business owners to choose SaaS solutions over other alternative choices.

Businesses have been constantly looking for solutions that can meet the organizational requirement such as data security and high performance and SaaS fits the requirement in these kinds of scenarios.