All Software as a Service (SaaS) applications share the following characteristics:
- The software is available over the Internet globally through a browser on demand.
- The typical license is subscription-based or usage-based and is billed on a recurring basis. In a small number of cases a flat fee may be changed, often coupled with a maintenance fee.
- The software and the service are monitored and maintained by the vendor, regardless of where all the different software components are running. There may be executable client-side code, but the user isn’t responsible for maintaining that code or its interaction with the service.
- Reduced distribution and maintenance costs and minimal end-user system costs generally make SaaS applications cheaper to use than their shrink-wrapped versions.
- Such applications feature automated upgrades, updates, and patch management and much faster rollout of changes.
- SaaS applications often have a much lower barrier to entry than their locally installed competitors, a known recurring cost, and they scale on demand (a property of cloud computing in general).
- All users have the same version of the software so each user’s software is compatible with another’s.
- SaaS supports multiple users and provides a shared data model through a single-instance, multi-tenancy model.
The alternative of software virtualization of individual instances also exists, but is less common.
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