As we continue our series on the five characteristics of SaaS, today, we delve into number two, Broad Network Access. Out of all the characteristics, this is probably the easiest one to understand. In short, it means you can access the application from anywhere, anytime, from any device. All you need is internet access.
In the everyday world, this is very common now, right? It’s table steak expectations for shopping, consuming music or banking. You set up an account, establish a username and password and off you go. Believe it or not, in the world of enterprise applications for businesses and government agencies, it’s not. Why? It’s extremely difficult and expensive for a software vendor to either build their product line in SaaS(if they’re a new entrant to the marketplace) or transition their product line to SaaS.
How, though, can Broad Network Access benefit an agency’s financials, supply chain and/or HR operations? I don’t have enough space here to list all the ways, but we don’t have to look far for one glowing example.
For the past two years, we’ve required remote work due to the pandemic. Everyone from planning and budgeting, finance, procurement and HR need remote access to the systems. For the organizations running SaaS applications, this is standard operating procedure. Easy, two/multi-factor factor authentication access, mobile functionality and probably most important and at the forefront of everyone’s mind, enhanced cybersecurity protocols to mitigate the heightened cybersecurity threats, IT staff can remotely troubleshoot but even further for them, fewer IT issues arise because the infrastructure is being maintained by the vendor.
Now, you may say, well, we’re on prem and we have mobile access, we can remotely log into the system and we have strong cybersecurity. Yes, you may, but to get these functional and technical abilities, you have to invest in third party solutions to overlay the application. This only makes your IT environment extremely more complex, creating many more break points.
Because Broad Network Access is such a table steak, it’s often taken for granted. To do it with excellence, it must be built into the application and the only way to do that is to build it on a SaaS platform. As mentioned above, that’s extremely difficult for the application vendor. For those providers that have transitioned to SaaS, they are delivering those table steaks with ease and excellence.