Feb

Advantages and disadvantages of SaaS and PaaS

Below I detail what I understand about the advantages and disadvantages of SaaS and PaaS, and of course what influences decision making in business. To a greater or lesser extent all these relate to paas saas and therefore I have chosen not to separate them.

Advantages:

Less initial investment and less risk, the use of the software without having to make an initial investment in machinery, software base (so) and additional software to run the application they would need in an environment in-house, is an important benefit for IT managers and ultimately for the company.

Cost reduction, in addition to paying for only what you need, you get a cost savings of maintaining the platform of machinery and the necessary software (databases, application server) to run your application.

Immediate updates and new features , a party that will not require dedicated staff for updates and software upgrades immediately. Sometimes we choose to use new features.

Support more agile and quick implementation. Bugs have a direct treatment and commissioning solution faster than in-house facilities.

The company focuses its efforts on your business , you really are outsourced to the point that systems do not expend effort in the choice and maintenance of systems.

However, always require care dept. IT but to a much lesser extent.

Increased availability and data security, against what may appear and in view of the disadvantages that we will see below, many companies have no procedures for backup, restore and general contingency plans in case of loss of information or hardware failure.

Most companies that offer software as a service offers an SLA (service level agreement) as to each type of user.

Disadvantages :

Low confidence in data security, the fact that corporate data can be critical or not but it is private, not located within the walls of the company is something that is not generally liked and especially to senior management in some occasions it is conservative and skeptical.

It remains an arduous task to convince and exposure of the idea by the IT manager the rest of the policy. Typically, it begins to introduce the idea of software as a service to applications that manage critical data (human resources, billing, law, etc.) and quantify the benefits of SAAS through a control panel.

Integration with the rest of the systems applications, as normal will be installing applications with local or in-house and SaaS, there is increased complexity in case you want to connect or use the data we have in the cloud with the data we have in the company.

This increases the degree of importance as to keep data in the cloud is important.

Need for availability of cloud data, if in addition to the above disadvantage the application or platform does not have a system (web service, API, etc. ..) that allows to extract data, is a clear disadvantage for not adopting the application in the cloud services.

Feeling customer captivity, but in general we have the same problem in-house facilities in paas-saas or where the volume of stored information is important and if we add the latency and speed of internet, can be decisive for the choice of software.

Possible breach of the agreements on the level of service, is related to the degree of confidence we have about the software vendor or platform as a service. We put in the hands of a vendor performance and application service we are aware of its advantages, but its disadvantage is whether comply with the agreed service level, and obviously is something that should have it in-house would take into account or not .