Should You Migrate to SaaS or Hosted Environments?

Deciding where to host your enterprise’s technology infrastructure can have an immense impact on your organization’s trajectory. Picking the precise environment can decrease your costs, lower maintenance expenses, improve responsiveness, provide higher options for scaling, and more. 

More often than not today, businesses are attempting to choose from hosting on a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) cloud or an IaaS-like (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) environment. Each may be good options for certain corporations. Dive into the professionals and cons of each approaches to see which one might fit your enterprise best.

SaaS, or Software-as-a-Service, has been gaining popularity over the past decade and now represents the fastest-growing software segment overall. 

Users can access SaaS applications through the net and are generally not liable for any a part of the software stack. SaaS providers maintain all of the required software, middleware, and hardware, end-to-end. 

While which means SaaS apps are in a position to considerably reduce maintenance costs, it also restricts the variety of customizations available to the businesses that use them. 

Listed below are some well-known SaaS examples: 

• Microsoft 365
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• Slack
• Shopify
• HubSpot
• Jira
• Asana
• ZenDesk

The foremost reason SaaS applications are getting increasingly popular today is that they provide quick and simple solutions. 

With SaaS apps, the prices are linear and predictable. There are not any hardware-related maintenance expenses (e.g., buying or managing servers), so that you generally don’t must hire IT staff. 

At the identical time, SaaS apps require next to no training, and your team can start working with them instantly. SaaS vendors also ensure their apps are scalable, so there’s no must plan out your growth (or downshifting) prematurely. Most corporations pay for SaaS solutions on a per-seat basis, so they can simply add or remove seats as needed. 

Although SaaS applications offer plenty of advantages, and most corporations will use a minimum of a couple of SaaS solutions to cover certain needs, they usually are not the precise answer for the whole lot. 

There are a couple of downsides related to most SaaS tools. 

The primary one is cost. While most SaaS solutions are cheaper with just a couple of licenses in comparison to investing in your individual infrastructure, there’s a degree where paying for each user will get dearer than maintaining a typical server. As your enterprise grows, paying for plenty of SaaS tools might turn out to be less and fewer appealing. 

The second downside is the power to customize your environment. Usually, you’ll be able to make some cosmetic modifications to the interface and user experience, but you’ll be able to’t create recent features or change the basic functionality of the SaaS app. 

So if maintaining your individual server is cumbersome and expensive, and dealing with SaaS is limiting and may cost a little increasingly with growth, is there one other solution that corporations can depend on? 

How about hosted environments? 

Hosted environments, also sometimes called IaaS or Infrastructure-as-a-Service, fill the gap between on-premises hardware and SaaS. 

IaaS providers take away all of the complexity related to networking, storage, server hardware, and operating system management. At the identical time, they offer customers the liberty to administer their very own applications, data, and software platforms. 

With a hosted environment, corporations pay just for the resources they use (e.g., bandwidth, storage, etc.) on a pay-as-you-go basis. This ensures scalability while keeping the upfront costs low, even for larger deployments. 

Some examples of hosted environments are:

• Liquid Web
• Digital Ocean
• Microsoft Azure
• AWS EC2
• Google Cloud
• Linode

Increasingly corporations nowadays realize the worth of IaaS over each on-premises servers and SaaS apps. 

Unlike on-premises hardware, hosted environments don’t require any large, upfront investments (and subsequent reinvestments). In addition they don’t require server IT staff. At the identical time, IaaS offers great performance and control over all of the essential points of the tech stack. 

With regards to SaaS, hosted environments offer significantly better customization options. You possibly can install and work together with your own applications of any complexity and usually arrange a custom environment that suits your organization best. 

Depending on the needs of your organization, the tradeoff between greater customization and greater responsibility for security and compliance might or may not give you the results you want. 

Within the IaaS environment, your provider is liable for all of the server hardware, but you’re still in command of the runtime of your services. 

While your IT costs will generally be lower with IaaS than with an on-premises server, they could be higher (especially when including indirect costs) than SaaS, depending on the dimensions of your enterprise. 

In the event you’re attempting to select the precise environment for your enterprise today, the reply will rely on your needs and the stage of your organization. 

On-premises hardware will not be a terrific selection for many corporations attributable to increased costs and complexity unless your enterprise is directly involved in managing servers. 

You’re prone to use various SaaS environments in your day-to-day operations (e.g., chat, collaborative documents, etc.), but moving all of your enterprise to a SaaS environment may cost a little you more in the long term and restrain your customization options. 

IaaS solutions provide a terrific balance between price, power, and freedom to develop your individual products. You’ll get a top-performance private cloud with a highly available environment to construct upon.

Still have some questions regarding the difference between SaaS and hosted environments? Allow us to help out. Just contact Liquid Web and ask about how VMware Private Cloud compares to other environments on the market. One in all our technicians shall be joyful to walk you thru the means of choosing the perfect hosting solution in your specific situation.