Consistent with the basic notion of cloud computing, SaaS is a model whereby the customer organization licenses applications from a service provider and provisions them to its users as needed. The applications run on the service provider’s infrastructure and are accessed through a public-network connection. They may be made available through the Internet as browser-based applications, or they may be downloaded and synchronized with user devices.
SaaS applications are centrally managed and updated. Typically, they are highly standardized, although they may vary in configurability, efficiency and scalability. The most common pricing model is a subscription plan based on the number of users, but there may be additional fees for transactions, bandwidth, storage and processing time.
