Advantages and disadvantages of SAAS

SAAS (SOF tware as a service, software as a Service) has many advantages, such as low costs, Fast deployment, and flexible pricing, however, there are also weaknesses in auditing, compliance with regulations, and integration with existing enterprise solutions. Enterprises should fully understand these advantages and disadvantages when selecting SAAS.

SAAS allows users to use real-time running software over the Internet. Because of its many Web 2.0 features, SAAS can provide users with an extremely rich experience and save users' investment, it is very popular in the software market. Gartner and Forrester both hold that SAAS is one of the fastest growing fields in the IT industry. SAAS advocates also claim that SAAS provides an option other than traditional application software packages for enterprises to achieve their business goals, with a much higher cost-effectiveness than the latter. Today, many well-known vendors, including Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon, and salesforce.com, provide SaaS solutions. Among them, the main services of providers such as Yahoo, Google, Electronic harbor, and Amazon are focused on meeting consumer needs, rather than meeting enterprise needs, the solutions provided by salesforce.com, collabnet, and Ben are specifically designed to solve common enterprise business problems. For example, Salesforce provides a solution for customer relationship management.

Advantages of SAAS

Saas-based solutions have some advantages. Enterprises should understand this before they decide to actively adopt such solutions. Advantages include:

■ Reusable;

■ Low cost;

■ Solutions can be provided faster;

■ Flexible pricing model, in line with the enterprise's development model;

■ Better support;

■ Better solutions;

■ Reduce IT resources required for enterprises.

One of the biggest advantages of reusable SAAS is "Reusable", which is actually the basis of all other advantages of SAAS. If you believe that enterprises should use SaaS solutions, you have decided not to repeat the work, but to simply use the existing solutions. At least, this solution is faster and cheaper to implement. Although not the best, it will also be "good enough ".

If a low-cost solution enterprise uses an SaaS solution, the cost is likely to be only a small fraction of the cost required to implement, deploy, run, manage, and support such solutions on its own. One of the biggest advantages of SAAS solutions is that they provide very significant economies of scale in terms of price. The reason for this is that most SaaS providers can easily leverage their "reuse" advantages in specific industries to provide highly reproducible "standardized" solutions. The final result is that they typically benefit customers from this reusable advantage, while significantly saving costs.

SaaS providers that can provide solutions faster have already planned, designed, implemented, deployed, and tested the solutions to be adopted by enterprises in specific fields. This means that enterprises can use existing solutions, and it takes a long time for enterprises to implement such solutions on their own. Taking most SaaS solutions as an example, the software has been running in real time and can be used at any time. The only "bottleneck" is the payment of service fees and how to associate this tool with your own business processes.

When a flexible pricing model uses an SaaS solution, enterprises usually use a subscription-based and deterministic pricing model, which allows enterprises to purchase the required services as needed. This means that enterprises can purchase the appropriate software based on the development model. As long as new connections are enabled when enterprises expand, new infrastructure and resources are not required. Once an enterprise scales down, you only need to close the connection. In this way, enterprises can avoid being tired of excessive infrastructure and resources. Traditionally, even if you no longer need them, you have to continue to need management and support.

To better support the use of SAAS solutions, enterprises are likely to use solutions provided, managed, and supported by experts. They focus on a specialized area 24x7. From many aspects, the provider is equivalent to the real-time extension of the enterprise. In fact, connecting to SaaS providers is a very low-cost method for users. As long as you connect to SaaS providers, the resources provided by SaaS are always serving you, which is equivalent to expanding the resources of enterprises.

To reduce the IT resources required for enterprises, you can connect to the managed platform of SaaS providers by using a browser, all the infrastructure required by users is the device used to run the browser and the simple network that allows the device to access the Internet. This means that enterprises do not have to provide, operate, manage, and support their internal infrastructure. For enterprises that are very small and do not want to manage the complex work of the IT department on their own, SAAS is undoubtedly an effective solution that will help accelerate the implementation of enterprise solutions, at the same time, reduce the necessary IT resources as much as possible.

Understanding the shortcomings of SAAS

However, just like making other decisions, you must pay attention to the shortcomings of SAAS. It is especially important to know that the implementation of SAAS projects cannot solve all the problems of enterprises. After all, what we get through SaaS solutions is only a software platform. Pay attention to the following issues:

■ Internal process of the enterprise;

■ How to handle audit and compliance issues;

■ Internal training on effective use of tools to solve internal business problems;

■ Pay regularly to the provider;

■ Integrate external SaaS solutions with internal business solutions and other external SaaS solutions.

SAAS is not a panacea. It is important to understand this. Another point is that, like any service obtained from external providers, it is equally important to ensure that enterprises can rely on service providers to provide services in a sustainable, stable, and cost-effective manner. However, although SaaS providers may have such shortcomings, it is worth investing in and purchasing the services of the other party. If this means that they can avoid the troubles of growth, and even more so.

SAAS: an effective outsourcing Method

SAAS is still a new concept in today's information age. It is still looking for a suitable position, but SaaS represents the next step in the IT outsourcing development process. Although it Human outsourcing has been common in the past few years, SAAS has outsourced all IT services, including related infrastructure and manpower.

SAAS can obtain various IT components through a controlled and reproducible service model. In this model, the provider acts as the center of excellence and consumers can easily contact the center to take full advantage of the economies of scale. This sounds like a "public computing" model. Enterprises now have access to IT-related services, just like they have access to welfare, wages, accounting, and legal services, this is actually a public computing.

However, because SAAS is still a relatively new concept, most enterprises are cautious and dare not rush to adopt it. Three business leaders usually welcome SaaS solutions:

1. far-sighted leaders who always want to be at the front end of the technology adoption lifecycle and use SaaS to achieve this goal.

2. Knowing what SaaS providers are good at is actually not a leader of their core competencies, they turn to external solution providers to help supplement their internal solution libraries.

3. Leaders who need to cut costs and gain operational efficiency as soon as possible.

In any case, people are increasingly adopting SAAS. Because it does not need to consider human costs, IT employees with higher salaries in western countries can now compete with foreign labor markets with lower costs. Therefore, SAAS is hailed as a "flat factor" for new outsourcing ".

However, although SAAS is accepted by more people as an outsourcing service, it cannot solve all problems. Some of the enterprise's value chains can always be directly added through the enterprise's IT resources. Determine which parts are processed internally and which are outsourced. In fact, it is necessary to correctly manage the company's business and understand which aspects are the core competitiveness of the company and which ones are not. Obviously, in the market, there is no solution that can replace good judgment.