SaaS or On premise? A question of the installation.
SaaS or on premise
This is usually an important topic in our daily talks with customers and prospects. The fundamental consideration behind is whether to store the data on a server of the client (On premise) or to let them be hosted by the provider (SaaS/Software as a Service).
So what makes more sense then? There are a few aspects to consider when responding to this question.
Microsoft has switched to SaaS aka cloud computing with the latest office pack, SAP is just about to migrate, Google has been doing it for long now and SalesForce has become the role model of the whole industry since the year 2000 already. Since 2012 we have been offering Unatrix to our clients mainly as a SaaS solution.
SaaS and On premise: market shares in comparison
The infographic (source: IDC Worldwide SaaS Enterprise Applications 2014-2018 Forecast and 2013 Vendor Shares) emphasizes the situation: (not only) since 2013 the market shares of on premise installations have been declining significantly. Probably during the year 2016 SaaS will finally take over on premise, with a continuing trend. Though, many of our clients and prospects are still asking us whether Unatrix is available on premise, i.e. as an installation on the server of the client.
Therefore it is here in public that we want to raise the question and answer it from our point of view: which model makes more sense for an applicant tracking system (ATS) – SaaS or on premise?
Advantages of SaaS
Here are the key points that must be taken into consideration for a cloud system:
- cost: clients have no monthly expenses for maintenance and monitoring of a personal server
- updates: in a cloud model the provider is able to update the software anytime in order to eliminate bugs or just to improve the application
- availability: Unatrix offers a 99% uptime garanty like many other SaaS providers
- security: we put trust in our partner Hetzner concerning the hosting of all systems and databases. They are obliged by the German data protection law which is the strictest regulation worldwide. It is their core business to provide data security, otherwise pretty soon nobody would trust them anymore. In addition, Unatrix is using a separation of the client databases, i.e. the instances are stored in individual databases
- support: from our point of view as provider of the tool it is much easier and faster to find the reason in case of problems than with on premise installations. In this case they would first have to set up an access to their server for us. Sometimes problems are only arising due to certain server features of on premise systems which we can exclude in our SaaS model
- time saving: no personal server means no server installation, no monitoring, no maintenance and no necessity for back-ups; this is all done by the provider
Advantages of on premise
These aspects speak for an on premise installation:
- direct access to the data by the client. This is only the case if the used database is not encoded
- for large enterprises with their own IT departments that already have a datacenter at their disposal it usually makes more sense to integrate new software there than to maintain a mix of SaaS and on promise; often there are IT policies implemented that regulate exactly this topic
Our conclusion
As soon as companies think about buying and installing a new applicant tracking system (ATS) normally one question arises: where is the data stored? There is the choice among software as a service (SaaS) aka cloud hosting and on premise, i.e. the customer is hosting the system himself.
According to our experiences more and more customers, among them also larger enterprises, let themselves convince by the advantages of SaaS and are happy to hand over the workload and the responsibility to a service provider.
What do you think, which solution would you prefer? Send us your thoughts! info@unatrix.com