As we have explained before in our last post, Cloud is a platform for providing services and these services can be categorized into three main categories. These categories are SaaS, PaaS , and IaaS. In this post, we are going to explain what SaaS is.
SaaS
SaaS stands for Software as a Service and it means software which provides services. There are differences between these services and the ones that other Softwares provide us. The main difference is that these services are based on the cloud platform and its features. Let’s take a look at the days before SaaS was created and see what was the reason for its creation.
The pre-history of SaaS
The centralized hosting of Softwares goes back to the 1960s. This was when companies like IBM or other Mainframe providers, offered these services as a processing tool. It means that when a process was too big to be done on a local system, they would use these to do the process. In the 1990s ASP or Application Service Providers came into the picture. An Application Service Provider is a third-party group that offers commercial software applications and their related services online.
SaaS is actually a developed version of the idea of ASP. For the first offered ASPs, you needed to also install the software on your computer. However, for Software as a Service, you can only access the software application using the browser!
Nowadays Software as a Service is being used all over the world as a web-based Software.
Features of Software as a Service
- Cloud-based
- Accessing the software through the web
- Centralized management of the software
- Users don’t need to manage or upgrade the software
- API or Application Programming Interface make SaaS work
Dropbox is an example of Software as a Service. This was one of the first solutions for web-based data saving.
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