The SaaS Advantage
The Concept is Simple and Attractive
Customers pay simply for using software, as opposed to owning the software itself. In other words, rather than buying a software license for an application and installing the software on individual machines, a business subscribes (via a monthly or yearly fee) to use the application hosted by the company that develops and sells the software.
Software as a Service (Saas) gives the buyer more flexibility to switch vendors and puts a stop to the continuous cycle of buying a software license, paying for a maintenance contract, and then having to go through time-consuming and expensive upgrades. SaaS eliminates these headaches, and enables businesses to achieve a lower and predictable total cost of ownership. Furthermore, since there are no capital expenditures, extra human resources or infrastructure (hardware and software) to deploy and manage, a SaaS solution is highly scalable, easily deployed, fully distributed and can be used anytime, anywhere on demand.
Another unique advantage to the SaaS model is that updates to the solution, including patches and vulnerability updates, are made in real time for all customers. As a result of these continuous improvements, QualysGuard scans are highly accurate and bugs are generally fixed within 48 hours.
As an added benefit to customers, SaaS solutions are especially secure and tamper proof, since support for operating and maintaining the solution falls squarely on the SaaS vendor. For example, Qualys encrypts all of its in-transit and in-storage data, and undergoes constant third-party security audits following standards such as the SAS70 Type II.
The bottom line, more and more organizations are making the shift to SaaS for one simple reason: it works and is cost effective.
