Tips & Tricks to make Choice Between SaaS And Traditional Hosting

Any company looking to buy a learning management system is confronted with two choices. The company can either choose a licensed LMS or it can go for a hosted one. The major difference is that while the company can purchase the licensed software and host it on its own computer servers, in case of the hosted service, the software is hosted on the vendor’s servers.

The hosted software service is also called SaaS. SaaS stands for Software as a Service. These vendor hosted services have become very popular in the last few years and the trend is catching up fast. This is due to the various benefits that it has to offer to the organizations, however big or small.

What is SaaS?

SaaS or Software as a Service is a business model that delivers the software applications to the clients through the web. The application can be accessed by the clients by using a web browser. Their pricing models are based on the various models. They are charged on a monthly basis for the use, number of enrolled or registered users, or the projects undertaken using the software.

The software as a service applications are hosted in the clouds. The clouds can be a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to run applications. They store, manage, and process data, offer storage and networking as well.

How is it different from traditional, licensed hosting?

The licensed hosting is completely opposite to the saas learning management system hosted in the clouds. In the traditional hosting models, the LMS software is purchased by the company. The software application is run on the servers owned or managed by organization. The networking, computing, storage and management of the resources is provided by the in-house IT teams of the organization.

How to select between SaaS and traditional hosting?

Since SaaS is a hosted service in the cloud and all the resources are provided by the vendor, the process does not require huge investments from the company. On the other hand, the traditional hosting is a resource intensive process and requires a proper setup of networks and systems to implement and run the LMS software applications.

The choice to select a hosting method is also influenced by the technical expertise of the IT staff of the company and the hosting capabilities of the company as well. Another factor that affects that choice is the current ERP, CRM, AMS or any other business intelligence software the company is already hosting on its own. If the company is hosting its own management system software, this implies that it has the required resources, IT capabilities and the expert staff to take care of any new addition to the existing hosted software list. So, it would be a better idea to host the LMS as well. On the contrary, if the company is not hosting anything now, it won’t want to start to host an application, simply because it has a new LMS. To opt for SaaS would be mush beneficial to the company in such a case.

We see that the company can decide to use SaaS or the traditional hosting depending on its capabilities, IT staff and expertise, existing management systems and resource availability.

GyrusAim is the web-based learning management system that allows for training administration, maintenance.