The Advantage of Shared Infrastructure

So, we can see how SaaS moves us more toward a unified infrastructure footprint. If we contrast this with the one-off, installed software model we covered above, you can see how this approach enables us to overcome a number of challenges.

Now that we have a single environment for all customers, we can manage, operate, and deploy all of our customers through a single pane of glass. Imagine, for example, what it would look like to deploy an update in the shared infrastructure model. We would simply deploy our new version to our unified SaaS environment and all of our tenants would immediately have access to our new features. Gone is the idea of separately managed and operated versions. With SaaS, every customer is running the same version of your application. Yes, there may be customizations within that experience that are enabled/disabled for different personas, but they are all part of a single application experience.

Note

This notion of having all tenants running the same version of your offering represents a common litmus test for SaaS environments. It is foundational to enabling many of the business benefits that are at the core of adopting a SaaS delivery model.

You can imagine the operational benefits that come with this model as well. With all tenants in one environment, we can manage, operate, and support our tenants through a common experience. Our tools can give us insights into how tenants are consuming our system and we can create policies and strategies to manage them collectively. This brings all new levels of efficiency to our operational model, reducing the complexity and overall footprint of the operational team. SaaS organizations take great pride in their ability to manage and operate a large collection of tenants with modestly sized operational teams.

This focus on operational efficiency also directly feeds the broader agility story. Freed from the burden of one-off, custom versions, SaaS teams will often embrace their agility and use it as the engine of constant innovation. These teams are continually releasing new features, gathering more immediate customer feedback, and evolving their systems in real-time. You can imagine how this model will directly impact customer loyalty and adoption.

The responsiveness and agility of this SaaS model often translates into competitive advantages. Teams will use this agility to reach new market segments, pivoting in real-time based on competitive and general market dynamics.

The shared infrastructure model of SaaS also has natural cost benefits. When you have shared infrastructure and you can scale that infrastructure based on the actual consumption patterns of your customers, this can have a significant impact on the margins of your business. In an ideal SaaS infrastructure model, your system would essentially only consume the infrastructure that is needed to support the current load of your tenants. This can represent a real game-changer for some organizations, allowing them to take on new tenants at any pace knowing that each tenant’s infrastructure costs will only expand based on their actual consumption activities. The elastic, pay-as-you-go nature of cloud infrastructure aligns nicely with this model, supporting the pricing and scaling models that fit naturally with the varying workloads and consumption profiles of SaaS environments.