Picking up on our 5 part series of what constitutes a SaaS solution, we move to characteristic #4, Rapid Elasticity.
According to our good friends at NIST, Rapid Elasticity is:
“Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.
What exactly does this mean? It means computing power, data storage and the like are automatically increased and decreased based on your demands. No work or effort on your part as a customer needs to be done. Here’s an example:
Let’s say you sell chocolate candies and you take online orders. Your website is hosted in the Oracle cloud and you typically receive 1000 orders a day. One morning, with a stroke of luck, the Today show, Good Morning America and Fox and Friends are all snacking on your chocolate covered cherries and raving about them. They all mention your company name and direct their audiences to your website. In an instant, you now have millions of website visitors, all wanting to place orders. An on-prem, self-hosted site would crash due to the immediate increase in traffic. All of that business would be lost. Not only that business, but your regular customers wouldn’t be able to order as well. What seemed like an incredible dream come true, just turned into a nightmare.
With SaaS, this wouldn’t happen. Due to rapid elasticity, the necessary computing power to handle the increased traffic would automatically and instantaneously be deployed as SaaS would autonomously detect the increased traffic. Orders would get filled, employees would get overtime pay and your donation to your favorite charity would be much larger!