Challenges with SaaS

In the SaaS deployment model, vendors deploy their software to their own cloud, and customers access that software through APIs or mobile/web UIs. While providing obvious benefits, this model also comes with some challenges.

Security and control

SaaS requires customers to send their data to the vendor's cloud. Customers typically have little-to-no control over how their data is handled and stored. This can create significant adoption friction for customers with sensitive data, particularly in regulated industries like healthcare, legal and finance.

Latency

Latency-sensitive, realtime applications (e.g. chat-bots, voice, video) can experience poor performance because of network latency between the customer's and vendor's respective clouds. This is exacerbated when the customer and the vendor host their cloud infrastructure in different physical locations.

Bandwidth costs

It is challenging, expensive, and often impractical to transfer large datasets from the customer to the vendor for processing. Another related hurdle is the operational cost of ensuring the integrity of these large datasets after transfer between clouds.