Understanding Software as a Service and How It Can Help Your Business

When businesses talk about new technologies, they often do so at a rapid pace. This leaves things like “The Cloud” and “Distributed Computing” left as ambiguous terms that most people can only associate with as being “good” without understanding why or how they work.

As you may already understand, this leads businesses into a situation where they become dependent upon things without actually knowing why.

In an attempt to help you understand cutting-edge technology better, let’s discuss what cloud computing is briefly before diving deep into the topic of Software as a Service (SaaS) and how it can help your business.

What is Cloud Computing?

It’s a cold, hard fact that servers are expensive. The cost of workstations and software licenses can also add up quickly.

Couple this with the fact that larger solutions demanding more power are both more money-intensive and complex, and you can quickly see the problem most businesses have with setting up their own computer hardware.

Now imagine if you could replace all your workstations, servers and computer hardware with one centrally-located server. You could even maximize how much computing power you used by partitioning off certain resources in a more efficient manner than workstations could ever hope to do.

This is essentially what cloud computing is.

The interesting part is that cloud computing is far more flexible than it leads on to be. Software-as-a-Service solutions highlight just one of the more interesting possibilities that cloud computing can bring.

The What and Why of SaaS

The cost of software can quickly become prohibitive, as was hinted at earlier. It can also become incredibly cumbersome ensuring software is compatible with all your workstations, that your employees can access it from anywhere they need, and difficult to perform continuous upgrades.

That’s where Software as a Service aims to make your business run smoother and cheaper. Just imagine how SaaS applications like Gmail and Google Documents have made the lives of countless people easier.

SaaS applications represent applications that can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection and a modern web browser. This allows your employees and customers to interact with your business from anywhere in the world.

All this can be done for less, as you no longer have to pay for individual licensing fees or have to deal with maximizing your software’s compatibility on different platforms.

SaaS applications allow you to keep every component that makes your application run on a server, rather than on a client computer. This means upgrades can be done at the source, which makes daily patches and optimization tweaks even easier to perform during the life of your software.