SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)

In cloud com­put­ing, a fun­da­men­tal dis­tinc­tion is made between three main ser­vice mod­els. The foun­da­tion is the Infra­struc­ture as a Ser­vice (IaaS) level. Under this model, basic IT resources such as com­put­ing power, work or data stor­age are pro­vided via the net­work.

The level above this is called Plat­form as a Ser­vice (PaaS). In this model, the ser­vice provider pro­vides users with a soft­ware envi­ron­ment that allows them to develop and com­mis­sion their own appli­ca­tions. Soft­ware as a Ser­vice (SaaS), in turn, pro­vides access to appli­ca­tion pro­grams as the third, top level.

Here, the SaaS cus­tomer can use the soft­ware pro­vided by the SaaS provider in its own data cen­ter online as a kind of ser­vice, with the SaaS provider tak­ing over its con­fig­u­ra­tion, main­te­nance and updat­ing. The provider pro­vides all the nec­es­sary com­po­nents of a data cen­ter:

Net­works, data stor­age, data­bases, appli­ca­tion servers, web servers, and dis­as­ter recov­ery and data backup ser­vices. It also pro­vides other oper­a­tional ser­vices such as authen­ti­ca­tion, avail­abil­ity, iden­tity man­age­ment, pro­duc­tion con­trol, patch main­te­nance, activ­ity mon­i­tor­ing, soft­ware upgrades and cus­tomiza­tions.

• Scal­a­bil­ity thanks to access per work­sta­tion and month, pay-​as-​you-​go, and the pos­si­bil­ity of adding and expand­ing fur­ther work­sta­tions and appli­ca­tions
• Allows you to focus on your core busi­ness by out­sourc­ing your IT infra­struc­ture, includ­ing all admin­is­tra­tive tasks and the high­est secu­rity stan­dards
• Reduce the bur­den on the IT depart­ment by main­tain­ing the infra­struc­ture and pro­vid­ing auto­matic updates
• Reduc­tion of con­fig­u­ra­tion and infra­struc­ture costs thanks to the avoid­ance of one-​time larger invest­ments and their depre­ci­a­tion expenses
• Increased flex­i­bil­ity and mobil­ity thanks to access to ser­vices from any net­worked device for eas­ier and more pro­duc­tive work at home