Where is your SaaS solution hosted? 3 things to consider!

Now that you’re ready to provide a SaaS solution to your client and prospect base, the last piece of the puzzle is to decide where and how you will provide the infrastructure for a SaaS offering.  Customers expect a solution that can be accessed from anywhere, be always available, flexible terms and a high service levels.  The service expectations of the B2C space are becoming the norm in B2B. You don’t want to waste your investment in developing a SaaS offering to be let down by a poor infrastructure that will harm your brand, reduce ROI and turn away customers. There are 3 possible options for SaaS Infrastructure:

 

1. In-house Infrastructure

2. Traditional co-location/hosting

3. Infrastructure as  a Service (IaaS)

 

An in-house infrastructure option will require you to invest significant amounts upfront in new hardware and connectivity. In order to provide the service levels your clients expect, you’ll also need to factor in redundant hardware and connectivity to mitigate the risks of outages. In addition to the large capital expenditures, you’ll need to consider either hiring additional staff to manage the infrastructure or look at moving existing staff from their current role to becoming infrastructure support specialists.

 

In addition, if you don’t currently have a 24/7 helpdesk, you’ll need to make it available to help diagnose and fix hardware faults as they happen, including out of hours.

 

The second option is the traditional hosting option, which is the first step to outsourcing the headache of managing the infrastructure. In this model, you’ll be tied to physical servers dedicated to hosting your SaaS application. This relieves you from needing the in-house staff and infrastructure, but you’ll need to ensure that you have provisioned redundant servers and infrastructure to reduce the impact from hardware failures.  This means that you may have significant amount of servers sitting idle until there is a hardware failure, costing you money.

 

The final option is to look at Infrastructure as a Service providers such as Commensus.  IaaS give you the flexibility of meeting elastic demand by providing virtual computing resources that can be scaled up and down at very short notice. A good IaaS provider will have architected their platform to mitigate the risks of outages and have built in redundancy across the stack covering;  connectivity, networking, computing and storage.  Your servers will be virtualised which allows you to leverage economies of scale and the resiliency inherent in virtualisation solutions. In addition, an IaaS provider ought to allow you to ramp up resource requirements as demand from your clients grow, allowing you to minimise upfront costs.