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How SaaS Migration Can Solve Your Problems: Pros and Cons of SaaS Model

Building on-premises software poses many challenges. For starters, it requires a large upfront investment to buy servers, CPU, memory, and other hardware. Secondly, the support and upgrade of the purchased hardware falls on your shoulders and entails additional costs. And last but not least, on-premises solutions are less flexible in terms of scaling: whenever you need to scale your product, you have to invest in more expensive equipment with higher capacity. For these reasons, more and more businesses are now opting for SaaS migration. Unlike on-premises software, SaaS solutions don’t require large upfront investments. Cloud service providers offer the hardware you need for your app on a subscription or pay-as-you-go basis, allowing you to select a plan that meets your business needs and budget. With their help, you can release and deploy your software much cheaper and easily scale your solution whenever your company needs it. But of course, switching to SaaS comes with many challenges you should be aware of. To help you decide whether moving from an on-premises tool to a SaaS solution is for you, this article covers everything related to cloud migration. In the following paragraphs, we describe what SaaS is, compare it to other cloud computing service models (PaaS and IaaS), discuss the benefits of SaaS, explore the challenges of the migration process, and, of course, show how to migrate to the cloud step by step. Let’s dive right in! What is SaaS? SaaS stands for software as a service. This is a cloud-based software licensing and delivery model where a cloud provider hosts applications and makes them available to the end user via the internet. In this model, the cloud provider is responsible for managing servers, databases, and other hardware required to deliver software to users. You, for your part, have to make timely payments for the service. As noted above, most cloud providers work on a subscription basis or use the pay-as-you-go approach: The subscription model implies making monthly/yearly payments for the service, regardless of usage. With the pay-as-you-go model, you pay only for the resources you use (for example, for a specific number of API requests) and as you use them. Software as a service is one of the three cloud computing service models. Apart from it, you may come across infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) models. IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS: What’s the Difference? Let’s briefly describe each model so that you know how they differ. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) IaaS providers offer storage, networking, and virtualization services. With this model, you rent hardware from a service provider and use it as the foundation for your application. This approach gives you more control over your app, but the management falls on your shoulders. Platform as a service (PaaS) PaaS providers offer platforms for software developers, allowing them to build, test, and deploy applications without worrying about the infrastructure. PaaS solutions provide development tools, databases, and application-hosting environments so that developers can focus on writing code while the underlying infrastructure is managed by the provider. Software as a Service (SaaS) Software as a service is when you deliver your cloud application as a service to users, allowing them to access your app from the internet. In this model, your application is centrally hosted and managed by a third-party provider, so you and your users don’t need to install, maintain, and manage your product locally on hardware. SaaS platforms are great for those who want their applications to run smoothly and reliably with minimal input from them. Now if that’s clear, let’s discuss why migrating to a SaaS business model is so tempting for businesses. Why Businesses Move From On-Premises to Cloud One of the most popular cloud computing providers, Amazon AWS, states that organizations that moved from on-premises to its platform achieved up to 66% infrastructure cost savings, 43% lower time to market for new features, and 45% fewer security-related incidents. While this information is obviously biased and should be taken with a grain of salt, SaaS solutions do help in terms of cost savings and speed of deployment. And that is the primary reason why businesses are migrating to SaaS. By migrating to the cloud environment, you will be able to: Save resources. Maintaining and upgrading your own servers, CPUs, hard drives, RAM, and other hardware is expensive, let alone time-consuming. With cloud migration, you won’t have to worry about all this. The hardware will be upgraded and maintained by a third-party vendor, allowing you to shift your focus to important business processes. Deploy faster. When it comes to on-premises deployment, you have to set up data center hardware. As for cloud-based software, it doesn’t require you to build and implement your infrastructure from scratch, giving you the opportunity to release and deploy your solution much faster. Secure sensitive data. Cloud service providers heavily invest in security measures, so applications stored in the cloud are well-protected from cyber attacks. With an on-premises solution, security becomes your responsibility, requiring you to invest large sums to protect your application. Fail to do that, and it will be susceptible to security threats, compromising your and your customers’ data. Reach a wider audience. Since a SaaS product is available via the internet, users can access it pretty much from any device with an internet connection. Consequently, SaaS migration can help you reach a wider audience and potentially increase your revenue. For example, when Adobe replaced its on-premises app “Adobe Creative Suite” with a cloud application “Creative Cloud,” the company saw a 44% increase in revenue and received over 700,000 new subscribers. Scale up and down on demand. With SaaS cloud migration, your software becomes more flexible in terms of scalability. For example, when you have an influx of customers, you can switch to a subscription plan with a better server to make your app handle the traffic load. Once the influx is gone, you can go back to your old plan and pay less. Obviously, this is not possible with on-premises solutions. Predictable revenue. With a SaaS business model, it becomes easier to predict revenue, as each customer will be paying a fixed fee for your services.