SaaS and the need for scalability

What requirement does the SaaS (Software + Service) put on your systems scalability? In theory it will require you to have IT systems that can scale more or less unlimited. This is if the context is that you are providing a SaaS system for others to use. If you are a provider of services to use or you are a company that are using services from someone else, you are still depending on the fact that it can scale. You could argue that when you are consuming the service (using) you can solve the issue by having a service level agreement (SLA), and yes some kind of contract is always needed when two parties are providing services to each other. But a SLA will not be very useful when your company shall merge with the newly bought company and you suddenly need twice the number of users that run the SaaS application, and the service provider just can not scale. It might be a question of time, the service provider needs to buy more hardware, and is "just" waiting to get it delivered, but depending on the service plattform in the back it might be that it just is not possible to scale.  SaaS is about using a service from some source, and the source can be modern and it can be of more or less legacy type. When it is a modern type of back end systems, and content sources there is a good chance of it being scalable, but what about when the backend system is old, and maybe not that scalable? will the Service provider have the possibility to scale as you as consumer want? It can also be the case that your SaaS provider is using some other SaaS provider and relays the result … then your provider is not in control of the scalability!

How can you then be sure that your provider can scale, or even … how can you be sure that you can scale when the demand of your services becomes huge!?

It is very much a question about communication and also to have total control of your environment. To communicate with the CxOs that takes the final decision if you shall buy/sell the service it is important to be able to show them what they are interested in knowing, and formatted in a way that they get the level of details that they want to have. It is equal important then to have control on much more detailed or fine granular level. Example of techniques is UML for system architecture, and powerpoint to describe the high level. The glue that makes this possible is to use an Enterprise Architecture framework that can contain both high level views and fine granular views. Examples of frameworks to use is Togaf, Zachman, or Capgeminis IAF

 

Technorati-taggar: SaaS , S+S , SLA , scalability , Enterprise Architecture , Togaf , Zachman , IAF