PMcrunch

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been gaining momentum slowly but surely for several years now. Many people are concerned that software as a service (SaaS) provides security and availability issues, and are concerned about putting their data on posted servers. This is of interest in the Project Management community, as SaaS is very appropriate for project management applications. Here’s a little perspective on that issue.

The application service provider model or Software as a Service (SaaS) means that both the application and data are hosted outside the user’s environment. One of the best known SaaS providers, salesforce.com, provides an online web-based application where a user works with his or her own “instance” of the application. The data resides on the salesforce.com server.

The advantages to the buyer are:

1. There is minimal commitment because there no fixed costs upfront – such as server investment, training, support personnel, and installation.
2. One cost to consider is switching costs. If you do get started – even on a trial basis - your data will reside on the provider server, will be in the application’s format, and your people will have become accustomed to using the system. This simply must be weighed and balanced.
3. You pay only for your usage. This makes licensing and ramping up very easy to do financially as it is entirely variable costs.
4. Software service providers are totally geared to providing the infrastructure and associated support. After all, they designed and developed the application, host it for many companies, and are geared to service the demand.
5. There are actually SECURITY ADVANTAGES to using software as a service provider. Because of their advanced infrastructure, they are likely to have at least as good if not better of a physical security situation than the customer. Thus, whether it is SSL encryption, database encryption, database management, backups, user management, or any other security issues, they are in the position to offer the very best.
6. A software as a service (SaaS) provider is in the best position to provide the optimal balance between security and accessibility by users, inside and outside the firewall, on mobile devices and other specific interfaces that may be important to the customer.
7. Software as a service (SaaS) guarantees that you will receive well tested updates simply as part of your continuing service. Thus, you don’t really need to worry about upgrades – buying them, analyzing them, installing them, or even training for them. They are simply done as a matter of course of business as usual.
8. In terms of availability, it is very likely that since it is the business of the software service provider to provide the highest availability possible, I would think that they would produce at least as good availability as would any customer organization.

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John Reiling, PMP

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