What is a typical infrastructure for a business? These are always racks with servers, system administrators, and a bunch of problems such as lack of memory, security issues, and the constant need to purchase system upgrades and hardware. These all require time and effort, and, of course, money.
Using SaaS trends is a perfect solution that saves your money and nerves. Many companies are moving, or have already moved, to a cloud-based virtual IT infrastructure. We have compiled a short SaaS industry report to help you make a decision.
SaaS Industry Overview
SaaS applications have been originally designed for a wide range of business tasks. These include accounting and financial management, analytics and smart processing of business data, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce, enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resources management (HR) and security. Such applications, according to the Salesforce classification, can be called “horizontal” SaaS applications.
However, not all potential clients will be satisfied with standard corporate software. Many will want to implement cloud services adapted to their field of activity. And when it comes to the crucial features, you will need help from a specialized SaaS vendor with deep expertise in this particular field.
This is why vertical SaaS applications are usually focused on the main market issues – this segment of applications is also called “industry clouds”.
The virtual IT infrastructure has reached its peak and been replaced by modern SaaS industry trends:
- PaaS, which allows you to develop your own applications in the cloud;
- IaaS, which enables the deployment of core computing resources.
What Are the SaaS Opportunities for Enterprise Infrastructures?
SaaS technologies for infrastructure are based on a simple idea – instead of selling physical server hardware in different data centers, we offer a certain number of computing resources. Companies that are using our full set of digital transformation strategies enjoy far more benefits than those who simply choose the cloud as a low-cost alternative to a physical data center.
How Does It Work?
When a company uses regular servers, some part of the capacity is always idle. For example, preparing for worst-case scenarios and peak loads requires installing a lot of hardware. Since on a normal day you have fewer clients, you would be maintaining and looking after servers that are not used most of the time. If, on the contrary, you have installed less equipment than needed for peak loads, you will still have to buy it to support the increased load. This incurs new costs. Besides, getting new equipment ready for operation is a laborious process: you need to manually connect the server to the rack, set everything up and monitor it.
To rid you of these troubles, we offer several virtual software servers installed inside one hardware server. This is a single piece of equipment, but inside it there are several separate spaces where different, unrelated programs are located. You can store several clients’ data on the same server – then it is much easier to keep track of the equipment.
This distribution of resources of physical servers between virtual server spaces has been already tested out by numerous customers. Resource distribution is performed efficiently, client’s server startup time is shorter, and the costs of maintaining and running it all are lower.
So, the most efficient SaaS industry trend is virtual servers with remote access instead of physical hardware on a rack.
Virtual servers have another feature that has greatly changed the way we used to work with infrastructure.
The fact is that virtual equipment, i.e. the virtual servers, is created from ready-made images – “snapshots” of the states of the operating system and all the applications inside it. These images are copied inside the cloud itself, then they are launched and you have a proper and set up server!
So, the image for creating virtual machines can contain not only the OS, but also various cloud services – for example, file storage. After deploying such a snapshot, you get a server that has not only the OS system, but also ready-to-use infrastructure elements.
This means you do not need to spend time and money installing and setting up your services from scratch!
Our administrators are put in charge of all such cloud services – they are the ones who update virtual databases, make backups of cloud file storages and monitor security.
Ready-made cloud servers and services, as well as their maintenance, have evolved into what is today called IaaS – “Infrastructure as a Service”. This means that, when purchasing virtual cloud machines, you can configure preconfigured server images and connections between them. You are not buying a set of hardware with different settings, but a ready-made solution that works properly and is supported at all times.
Types of Cloud Infrastructures
The IaaS market development has led to the emergence of several subtypes of cloud infrastructures.
Public Clouds
This is the most promising Saas trend. Its essence is that you share computing power with other clients within the cloud. You may have other projects on the same physical server, but nobody will ever know about their existence – each user has their own space, and all virtual servers are isolated from each other. Just like an apartment in a multi-storey building.
Virtual Private Clouds (VPC)
This means that a cloud provider completely allocates a part of its physical servers to you and only your virtual machines can work on them. This type of access to the system requires certain additional costs. Cloud isolation may be needed for those companies that need some special security requirements, although regular clouds are already as secure as possible for the customers.
Private Clouds (Micro-SaaS)
It sometimes happens that you need to have 100% control over the IT infrastructure. For example, if you are in charge of government data or highly secure information, you may have to follow some strict security requirements dictated by the law. It may also forbid you to use public clouds or even VPC. In this case, you can have your own cloud in your data center and allocate all the resources to your departments in it. At the same time, you will be in charge of taking care of the servers and other services.
Hybrid Clouds
This is when a part of the cloud system is operating under the supervision of a cloud provider, and another part of highly secure systems and data is in a private cloud mounted in the client’s data center. This way you can get all the advantages of a public cloud solution and full control over the data in your cloud.
Benefits of Using Cloud infrastructure
The most obvious thing is that ready-made infrastructure makes your IT processes cheaper and faster. Instead of fiddling with hardware and a staff of administrators, you can get work done with a smaller number of employees who quickly buy and deploy the necessary capacities from the provider. And your IT specialists have more time for other tasks when they no longer need to configure the updates and fix problems with the equipment!
Flexible Use of Resources
Are you planning on having an influx of clients? We will get 100 additional cloud servers, serve the stream of requests, and when everything is back to normal, we will turn off the servers and return the freed up capacity to the provider. Are you deploying a new version of an application? We can get you a cluster of cloud machines for two hours, test it, and return the servers back to the provider. The cloud is using a pay-as-you-go policy, so there are no maintenance costs for idle equipment.
The quality of ready-to-use cloud servers is usually higher than in-house deployments. Cloud machines are set up and supported by our administrators who know everything about how they work and monitor thousands and thousands of virtual machines. The services we have set up before have been verified and perfected over many months of work in the most difficult conditions. A cloud service is, on average, better configured than the one configured by the system administrator. The future of SaaS is public clouds run by the best of the best!
We hope that this brief SaaS industry report was helpful. If you have the desire and the opportunity to bring your UI/UX -design into full compliance with modern trends, fill out the feedback form on our website, write to welcome@angleto.com or skype: lazey.lazey. We are always happy to answer all of your questions and offer the best solutions to any problem you may face.
