Unless you’ve been living under the rock the past few years it is very likely you use Software as a
Service, or SaaS, on a daily basis for business and as a consumer. SaaS is one of the three main
categories of cloud computing, Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, and Platform as a Service,
or PaaS. Out of the big 3 cloud computing models, SaaS is the most popular and commonly used one,
AND the great thing about it is you don’t have to be a developer or an IT expert to use it!
So, SaaS in a nutshell is a method of delivering software and applications over the internet via a
subscription model. This a game changer compared to our traditional software model used prior to
the emergence of cloud computing, where users would have to manage, install, and upgrade
software themselves on local servers or computers. With SaaS you can simply provision a server for
an instance in cloud, and in a couple of hours, you’ll have your software or application ready for
use. Some key examples would be the email client you use such as GMail, the applications and tools
you have on your computer, such as Microsoft Office 365 or Adobe Creative Cloud, or even
when you are jamming out to your favorite music streaming service, these are all SaaS, providing
productivity apps over the internet. SaaS is also used in a wide variety of business operations
today, such as communication and collaboration, customer relationship management, billing, sales
management, human resources management, financial management, enterprise resourcing planning,
you get the gist, the list goes on and on. So, unlike our other cloud computing service models,
SaaS is the very top of the IT stack and has the highest level of abstraction. So, this means the
cloud service provider will be providing and maintaining all these layers for you in this
stack. So, let's take a look what that might look like and see how a user would typically consume a
SaaS application. So I'm just going to go ahead and just shift these other stacks over here and
let's slide the SaaS deck right here. Okay. So, our users would access a SaaS application within
what we call a multi-tenant architecture, and by tenant I mean user. So, you'd have multiple users
all accessing the same pool of resources within the stack. So it'd be the same hosted environment,
same hosted servers where multiple users would have their own dedicated space to securely store
their data. There's a lot of benefits with this in a SaaS application. So let's take a look at a few.
So one you know right off the bat is it's much more cost efficient compared to our other models
because again, which is the overall theme of this whole video, is cloud service providers would be
maintaining and managing the application for you. So, there's no IT overhead cost
and a SaaS application is typically consumed on a subscription-based model which is either on
an annual basis or a monthly basis. And that includes support typically whereas
with our older traditional models, on-prem, you would have a perpetual license where you'd have
a pretty large up front cost and then you'd have to pay for support on going separately.
Two, scalability, right. So, you can horizontally or vertically scale on demand because again that
cloud service provider is going to be maintaining everything for you. So if you need to add more
databases, or you need more compute power they'll take care of that for you on a has needed basis.
Another benefit is you can access your SaaS application anywhere which is a
huge benefit right now especially if you want to mobilize your workforce, right. So
all you need is a web browser and internet connectivity to be up and running with your
SaaS application. There's no installation, there's typically no plugins involved
and you can no matter where you reside geographically, you can always be up and running.
Now I should say if you are looking for a SaaS solution there are some instances where you do
need to keep your data in the same location where you reside. For instance, with Europe we have GDPR
and by law you have to maintain your data where you reside. So, there are going to be
some instances like that, but for the most part SaaS is a highly secure solution. And
then last but not least, you always have a new version, right. So, once again there's no need to
update your licensing or update manually the new version of your software because that's all taken
care for you and it's automatically upgraded. And this helps with a lot of wide range of
issues typically if there's version control, right. In the past you'd download software
and then you might be operating with something that's not compatible with a different version
of that software. So, everyone's on the same version of that software and you don't have to
manually update and worry about patching and all that junk, everything's taken care of for you. So,
this is just a very quick overview of Software as a Service. Thank you for joining.
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