1. The rise of cloud computing has brought numerous innovations and changed the way many
different companies do business. One of these innovations has been the advent of Software as a Service
(SaaS), in where the software a company uses to run its operations, as well as the data input into it, is
hosted offsite by a third-party provider and accessed online. While this model has a great many
advantages, it is not without its drawbacks, both of which a company must consider before choosing
between SaaS or a traditional software model.
The most important of the benefits of SaaS is the money it saves for a company. With a
traditional model, a company has to buy copies of software, install it on every machine in its network
that requires it, and then pay for an IT staff to maintain and update it on demand. The SaaS model
removes most of the need for that. The software does not need to be installed on every machine, as it is
accessible through the web, and the company does not need a large amount of storage space to hold all
the data it generates. It also minimizes the need for the company to maintain an IT staff, as most of the
maintenance and support work for the software is handled by the third-party provider hosting it. Thus,
instead of having to invest a significant amount of resources into developing a complete network
infrastructure, companies can just pay for the services and storage space they use, and simply upgrade
their service plan as their needs grow.
However, despite these benefits, SaaS also raises some serious concerns. One of the biggest is
privacy. With the company’s private data being stored off-site, with a third-party, there could be an
issue of that data falling into the wrong hands. It could be stolen by hackers and either used by a rival
company, or used for malicious purposes, damaging the company’s reputation in the process. There is
also the issue of reliability. If the third-party provider has their network go down, it could effectively
shut out all the users that rely on it for their company’s operations. That could prove to have disastrous
consequences for its customers, monetary and otherwise.
Despite these drawbacks, I believe the numerous benefits the SaaS model provides make it a
much better option for any enterprise to take. That’s why it’s no wonder that so many companies, from
large corporations to small stores, have abandoned the old way of doing business and embraced the
cloud.
Source:
Peiris, Mini. “The Pros and Cons of Hosted Software.” SmartBiz. Cingle Synergy, n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2013.