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The benefits of SaaS in your digital platform

By  Ryan O'Dell  ·  3 minute read
In the past, digital platforms were run and managed by your teams (on-premise or on your cloud infrastructure). Today, nearly all platform vendors provide a vendor-managed cloud-based solution with a subscription model (Software-as-a-Service or SaaS).

If you are currently still managing digital platforms in-house and experiencing the issues below, it may be worth considering moving to a vendor-managed SaaS solution:

  • Outages, performance problems and poor systems reliability

  • Lengthy and costly upgrades

  • Difficulty finding people with the right skills to manage the platform

This article explains the different types of managed platforms typically offered by CMS vendors and guides you through some of the main considerations when switching to a vendor-managed platform model.

The rise of SaaS

Software-as-a-Service took off in the mid 2000's alongside advances in cloud technology. The SaaS model offers software over the internet as a subscription-based service rather than as a one-time purchase installed on customer’s infrastructure. This model is very beneficial for both vendors and their customers:
  • Customers get access to sophisticated software which scales as they grow, without the need for complex installations or expensive infrastructure.
  • Vendors can release updates seamlessly, maintain security centrally, and have predictable, recurring revenue.
Despite these benefits many in-house managed platforms are still out there.

Different shades of SaaS and PaaS

Not all SaaS offerings are equal. This has a lot to do with:

  1. The need to safely deploy and run customer-managed code on the platform
  2. The baggage that older vendors had to carry when compared to newer vendors whose products were natively-engineered for and only available in a SaaS model

When vendors made the decision to move from on-premise installations to offer SaaS, they were forced to ensure their software worked in both models, which led to compromises. As such many of these offerings were, or still are more Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) than true SaaS:

  • Every customer has dedicated infrastructure to make it ‘safe’ to allow the customer to deploy code without disrupting other customers.
  • The customer might still need a lot of niche knowledge to run the platform even though the underlying platform is managed by the vendor
  • The platform needs to be upgraded periodically, rather than this being a continual process
  • It might not be easy to scale individual capabilities separately (for example CMS backoffice, website, search)
A PaaS-leaning platform is not necessarily a bad thing - such platforms offer greater flexibility and often a wider range of capabilities, if you have the right skills to manage it.

Whats right for you?

When deciding whether or how to move to a SaaS solution, good analysis is required:

Business objectives

What issues are you experiencing with your in-house managed platform, and how are these preventing you achieving your business objectives? Can these issues be attributed to the fact that the platform is running in-house, or do they run deeper? You may need to widen the scope of your move to SaaS to a general platform review of your vendor(s) and operating model as you don’t want to invest in a SaaS migration only to find out that key issues remain.

Costs

Make sure you have a clear view of the current cost of ownership of the current platform and how that will change with a vendor-managed platform. SaaS may not be cheaper on the surface, so make sure non-tangible costs like reliability, security and finding the right people to manage your in-house solution are factored in. Conversely make sure you understand the vendor's pricing model beyond your initial needs, to avoid nasty surprises as you grow.

Capabilities

As mentioned SaaS platforms are usually less flexible than PaaS or inhouse managed platforms in terms of customisation and deploying and running your own code. Whether you are changing vendors, or buying a SaaS subscription from your current vendor make sure that key requirements from the business, IT , compliance and operations are covered. 

Its also important to have a good understanding of the knowledge and skills you will need to operate the your chosen vendor’s SaaS platform and their availability in your current team, or on the market (either to hire directly or via an agency).

Timing and approach

The larger and more complex the platform, the harder it will be to migrate it to a SaaS platform. This sunk cost will need to be written off against the cost of ownership of the platform over a number of years, unless you can combine it with other initiatives which add more tangible value such as a redesign project. Its often easier to start from scratch in a SaaS platform and only migrate key content and data, rather than to lift-and-shift your legacy platform (along with its issues) to the cloud. If changing vendors, its likely that this is the only realistic option.

Conclusion

SaaS or PaaS models will very likely offer a more scalable, reliable and easy to operate platform than an inhouse-managed solution but be sure to understand the nuances of your vendor’s cloud offerings in terms of costs, flexibility and capabilities. Also, this could be the right time to do a more general platform review to ensure that your new SaaS platform sets you up to achieve wider business goals.

Some further guidance can be found below: