JDPFu.com 2025

Background for SaaS

SaaS, Software as a Service, is the rage in the computing world today. Every big company is getting into it and using Web 2.0 as the initial buzzword. I read a few IT news aggregaters every day and each of them constantly link to SaaS websites. You know them too. A short list:

• Google, Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Maps, Google-Checkout, Google-whatever
• Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Small Biz
• eBay, Paypal, RIM/Blackberry
• online stock trading
• Twitter, 30boxes, iTunes, Don’t forget the milk, Wordpress, Blogger, salesforce
• Microsoft-Live, Live Meeting, Microsoft SaaS, Small business packages
• GotoMyPC.com, Pandora, Hulu,
• 37signals – project management, contacts, collaboration, chat, project organization for small businesses

Basically, any website that provides a useful interface and requires your internet connection is SaaS. Email is the simplest SaaS even if you use Outlook or Thunderbird as clients. Without the server, there isn’t any communication happening.

If you are a SaaS provider, you probably love cloud computing, but that’s a different article.

The Good about SaaS

1. Quick deployment. Usually, you’re up and running in a few hours.
2. Low initial costs – $20/month per user per service is common. It really is impressive what you can get for this small price and you didn’t have to buy a server, tapes, backup, IT guru, anything. Of course, $99+/month for higher end solutions exists too.
3. You don’t run any network or server infrastructure for the application
4. In theory, THE experts run the software
5. Upgrades are handled by the experts. Usually the people who created to software. If something bad happens, it isn’t just your 10 users, so they work really hard to get it fixed, now.
6. Backups aren’t your problem
7. Disaster Recovery isn’t your problem
8. System Security isn’t your problem
9. You don’t have to have people to manage this system, send them to training, keep them up to date or worry about their career goals.

The Bad about SaaS

1. Internet down? So are your applications
2. Privacy? What’s that? Google applications are mostly free. How can they do that? By indexing everything and building a profile of you based on it. Any data that goes through the SaaS provider can be misappropriated for alternate use that you didn’t approve, didn’t know about and can’t stop. It may not even be the service providers’ fault since the server may be hacked for months before they realize it. | Monster Hacked. It is unlikely you’ll ever know that a service is hacked. Current laws in most locations do not require service providers to tell anyone.
3. Run by experts? Perhaps not. SaaS providers can be Fortune 50 companies or some guy in their basement. You can’t tell. The guy in the basement isn’t necessarily bad, but he probably doesn’t have the resources or skill to build fault tolerance, redundancy, and disaster recovery into his systems.
4. System redundancy? How many physical locations is your data stored? If the WAN link goes down, what happens? Google provides 3 addresses, but 37signals only provides 1. That doesn’t mean there are 20 systems behind that single address, but it usually means a single location for all the servers.
5. Secure Customer Data? Maybe not. Most of these SaaS solutions store your data in the same database with all the other customers’ data. If you main competitor uses the same SaaS provider, it is just a software glitch away from being provided to any of the users.
6. Security and Access Controls? Can you configure the SaaS access to be connected to your internal enterprise authentication? What happens to these accounts when someone leaves your company? Are they automatically disabled?
7. Backups performed – maybe not
8. Disaster Recovery
9. All that data you enter – how do you get it out? Suppose you go with Salesforce.com, a leader in SaaS CRM applications. Your sale team enters 1,000s of leads and contacts into this system. The more you use it, the more useful it is, so the more they can charge you. Makes sense. For 100 users, it is $150K/yr subscription for the enterprise version. Don’t get trapped.
10. You want to switch providers – how do you migrate from SaaS-A to SaaS-B or bring the solution internal?
11. Larger WAN connectivity needs and you’ll probably want a redundant link too. You hope the provider has redundant WAN connectivity too.
12. Even the best providers fail. gmail down 1 | gmail down 2 | gmail down 3 If google can’t keep email up, what hope do the other SaaS providers have?
13. Who owns the data? You or the service provider? Be certain that you know.

SaaS isn’t all good and it isn’t all bad. It definitely has a place, but be certain that if you go with this model for your business, be certain you understand the limitations and get a contract executed that addresses your downtime concerns sufficiently.