Businesses of all sizes are adopting SaaS, or Software-as-a-Service, which is a software delivery model where applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and accessed by customers over a network, usually the Internet. In this model, software and related data are stored centrally in the cloud. How does SaaS differ from other cloud models, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)?
With LaaS, service providers give customers access to shared IT infrastructure resources like servers, storage, and network components based on a pay-per-use model. The service provider owns the equipment and takes care of housing, cooling, operation, and maintenance. PaaS is a model where service providers set up complete computing and solution stacks for deploying applications. They supply the networks, servers, and storage for the environment and handle different levels of scalability and maintenance.
Salesforce was the first SaaS built from scratch to achieve rapid growth. The products and services offered by Salesforce include customer relationship management, the sales cloud, the service cloud, force.com platform, chatter, APX Exchange, configuration, and web services. Among the key drivers of SaaS growth include broadband and mobile. Analysts are seeing SaaS as the primary type of cloud investment, with 82 percent citing usage today and 84 percent looking to SaaS as the deployment model for new applications.
To learn more about SaaS, check out the infographic below presented by ProfitBricks.
