Is SaaS Right For That Application?

January 2012 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Matt Pillar, Editor In Chief

Big retailers are dipping more than toes in Software as a Service (SaaS) for delivery of critical applications, but some skepticism persists. Is there anything you shouldn’t run in a SaaS model?

Chris Martin, CEO at CORESense, was pushing his company’s applications via the cloud back when SMBs were the expected benefactors of the delivery model. Today, retailers of all sizes are looking for the benefits of cloud and SaaS application delivery. Is there a limit to what can or should be hosted?

SaaS caught on quickly, but some retailers are leery about moving some applications to the cloud. Are there applications that simply don’t belong there?

Martin: When you break it down, the only distinguishing feature between cloud and premise is the end-user delivery mechanism — cloud-based solutions are delivered using the public Internet and premised are not. Given the reliability of the public Internet, today carrying voice, video, and sensitive data, it’s hard to build an argument that an application can’t be delivered from the cloud.

What really determines whether an application can be successfully deployed from the cloud is the architecture of the solution. The architecture determines the availability of the application, its ability to be customized to meet the unique needs of each retailer, and its ability to protect a retailer’s data from theft or loss. The application vendor’s service level agreement spells out exactly what the retailer is going to receive in terms of availability and data security, backup, and redundancy, among other things. The truth of the matter is that a properly architected SaaS offering will provide a retailer with better availability and protection of data than their existing solution.