Cloud Hosting

Software as a Service (SaaS), also known as Software on Demand is the new way Customers can access software applications. Whereas traditionally the applications would be installed locally from a CD or downloaded from the internet and configured to be compatible with the local platform, now webmasters and developers can access pre-configured software from the cloud. No time is wasted with installation, configuration and setting up any parts of the environment - this is done automatically by the vendor as the product is hosted on their architecture.

The end user would usually pay for the benefit of SaaS by paying a periodical subscription or paying as per usage (ie. for only the parts of the application that he/s he uses). Whereas in the traditional local installation model, the user would pay for the software as a whole, now he/she can upgrade the plan to activate certain modules to match requirements. As you can see, SaaS is much more flexible and the customer has a great deal more capacity for customisation. The main benefit for the consumer is that there isn't huge a huge initial expenditure for any hardware or software and that they are no longer required to configure what can often be very complicated applications.

Although SaaS appears to be similar with its predecessor ASP, both are not the same. The ASP model allowed the organisation to move their application to a third party server, whereas SaaS provides shared applications which can be accessed by different users from their desktops.