With a tremendous amount of information floating in the online space, Cloud Computing and SaaS are moving into the mainstream. Reason? A majority of the IT enterprises are using Cloud services. Earlier big tech players like Microsoft and Adobe were selling software licenses as their business model, but now they offering their products and services on subscriptions models today.
Also, if you would look at the following stats on Cloud Computing and SaaS market, you would realize that many enterprises are taking interest in this service domain:
- The survey conducted by Synergy Research Group revealed that enterprise SaaS exceeded $100 billion in the first quarter of 2019. Moreover, the market continues to grow by 30% annually.
- The annual run rate of Salesforce in 2019 exceeded $14 billion.
- In 2018, an average company recorded investing $343,000 on SaaS services, which is a 78% rise from the previous year.
Hence, it is quite evident that Cloud Computing and SaaS have become a must for enterprise computing.
But if we look back at the history of Cloud Computing and SaaS, you would realize that these trends were not that much popular at the time they entered the market. Back then, employees required connecting with a company’s internal server to access its data and applications stored on a central server. Among a few early innovations, recruitment, customer relationship management, and expenses were the first apps for businesses, while consumers enjoyed applications like photo sharing, webmail, and bookmarking.
Since then, Cloud Computing and SaaS has been gaining widespread popularity. Today there are thousands of applications across the Internet offering an array of solutions and opportunities to meet the customers’ increasing expectations.
Now, you might be wondering why businesses are quickly moving towards adopting Cloud Computing and SaaS and how they are significant for enterprises.
For this, you will have to understand why Cloud Computing and SaaS are crucial in enterprise application development.
Importance of Cloud Computing and SaaS in Enterprise Application Development
According to Gartner, over $111 Billion IT investment has shifted from on-premise IT setup to the Cloud and is expected to rise to $216 Billion by 2020.
There was a time when enterprises had a common question, “To Cloud or not to cloud?” Soon this confusion came to an end, and today, every other company is shifting from an on-premise to cloud. And why not? Easy to deploy with the highest scalability, affordable and hassle-free, centralized data, are a few advantages cloud computing offers to the enterprises. As such, it won’t be unfair to say that Cloud enables enterprises to grow their business while lowering their IT costs and simplifying IT management – the two biggest roadblocks in every business’s success journey.
Cloud Computing Vs SaaS
Often these two terms are considered the same and used interchangeably. While both Cloud and SaaS are closely related to each other, they are a lot different.
Cloud computing is a computing style in which elastic and scalable IT- enabled capabilities are delivered as a service over the internet. Putting it simply, it is the delivery of servers, database, software, networking, analytics over the internet. Users pay only for the cloud services they use, which helps them minimize their operational costs and scale as their business needs change.
On the other hand, SaaS is a subset of Cloud Computing Architecture. It is a modern way an application is delivered over the internet. Users don’t need to install the application on their machines and can access online. Users don’t need to buy a license to use the SaaS application. Instead, such applications are rented over a period, say monthly or yearly basis. Usually, SaaS applications can be accessed online by logging in to the provider’s website.
How Cloud Computing and SaaS Influence Modern Business?
There are so many revelations, and numbers that speak of how implementing SaaS and Cloud is empowering the organizations. They can now modernize and digitize their business effortlessly. With the SaaS computing model and cloud architecture, companies are now able to innovate faster without the need to invest much.
While organizations are embracing cloud for good, SaaS-based enterprise applications help them produce new innovations faster than their traditional applications. Powerful cloud-based data centers aid in sophisticated real-time analytics functionality, enabling users to access applications from any device. Smart mobile devices, modern development standards, and faster public networks allow organizations to offer excellent user experience. Above all, the adoption of SaaS simplifies enterprise data centers by freeing up IT resources. Looking ahead, SaaS has helped many smaller businesses to emerge and grow, who could otherwise never host complicated applications on-premises.
1. Integrate and Expand Depending on Needs
With SaaS, adapting to new software is no more a challenge for organizations. They can now integrate the existing software (Ex: ERPs) with new SaaS applications without having to worry about conflicts in their programs and workflow. This means, companies can continue to use their current software as they can be easily integrated with the SaaS solutions.
2. Limited Initial Investment
Instead of a huge upfront expenditure with an on-premise system, SaaS can be used as an operating expense. This is because SaaS works on ‘pay-as-you-go’ model and no infrastructure set up or recurring maintenance fees.
3. Omnipresence
With the SaaS model, enterprises can easily access their CRM database from anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Since SaaS–based solutions are hosted in the cloud and can be accessed over the web, such CRMs have become the top preference for businesses, especially for salespeople as they spend most of their time in the field.
4. Seamless Collaboration
With Cloud, multiple parties can improve technologies through a common platform. Users of a cloud application can collaborate and manage their supply chain efficiently. They can share information or business processes with other vendors and participants.
5. Faster and Scalable
Because SaaS offers faster processing and scalable data analytics, the time it takes to complete a project is relatively low. No extra efforts are required to scale up the SaaS solutions based on the needs.
Conclusion
In short, the ability to faster deployment and range of capabilities with minimal investment risk has made Cloud computing and SaaS a top choice for many enterprises. Together they have proven to fulfill the organizational requirements with data security, as their topmost priority.
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