Question Of The Week

• Explanation

For in-house applications, all programming code, servers, and databases for business applications are housed within the company. For Software as a Service (SaaS), external service providers host and maintain the servers, databases, and programming code for business applications in a cloud computing environment.

Users purchase licenses on a subscription basis and access business applications (eg, payroll, customer relationship management) via the internet without performing software or hardware installation while on company premises. Using SaaS introduces concerns about data migration and ownership of the data.

Data migration may be more challenging for SaaS than for in-house applications because bandwidth limits may make it difficult to move large amounts of data to the SaaS provider. Although SaaS users generally own the application data, SaaS providers may be able to sell aggregated and de-identified data to other organizations (eg, advertisers).

(Choices A and B) Both in-house and SaaS applications are concerned with disaster recovery capabilities and user access and security. Access controls are maintained by the SaaS user within the SaaS application; controls related to availability, data storage, and IT hardware are the responsibility of the SaaS provider.

(Choice C) Both in-house and SaaS applications must allocate software expenses and overhead to user departments.

Things to remember:
In a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) arrangement, external service providers host and maintain the servers, databases, and programming code for business applications within a cloud-based environment. One concern relevant to SaaS is the ownership of the processed data and the high costs of migrating data.

Lecture References :

• BEC 3.03 : Business Processes & Information Technology: IT Infrastructure