Nowadays companies have started to rely on packaged software applications they purchase. Most of the latest packaged software are running in the cloud, rather than running on-premises in their own data centers known as Software as a Service.
The idea of having applications that run remotely at service providers that you access from your company is not new, it’s been around forever. Companies use email, SharePoint sites, and all sorts of business applications, hosters elsewhere.
How is SaaS different?
Traditionally, when a hoster provided an application, they ran an instance of the complete application just for your organization. In SaaS, that is not the case. SaaS applications are generally multi-tenant (multi-tenant means shared). It means that a single application is being shared by multiple customers, multiple companies. Each of these customers has its own data, and it’s the responsibility of the application to keep that data separate and secure. Not every cloud application uses this approach, but it’s fair to say that the idea of multi-tenancy is central to the modern notion of SaaS.
SaaS Examples
Lots of different vendors provide SaaS offerings across various areas like CRM, customer relationship management, email, storage, productivity, and ERP. Like Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 offers CRM, and ERP, and more. They also have SaaS solutions for emails with Exchange Online, for Storage with OneDrive, productivity with Office Online, and others. Google is a big SaaS provider too, with very popular Gmail along with Google Drive for storage, Google Docs for productivity, and other solutions, there are lots more. These are just a couple of examples of what is, in fact, a very large set of vendors offering SaaS solutions across a broad range of markets.
