Applications are everywhere these days. From business and entertainment to wellness and filters for selfies, there’s an app for literally everything. As broadband speeds continue to climb, more and more businesses are now turning to hosted applications for their everyday needs. In the business sector, the most common apps are utilized for day-to-day calculating, document creating, editing, etc. By hosting these applications in the cloud, businesses are offered a more secure and cost-effective storage solution. Read on as detail the state of hosted applications today and how the proper management of them can benefit your business.
Before one can truly diagnose an issue, one must understand it.
So, let’s define a hosted application.
A hosted application is a software as a service (SaaS) solution that allows users to execute and operate a software application entirely from the cloud on a recurring subscription. These applications are typically hosted and powered from the remote cloud infrastructure and can be accessed from anywhere in the world via the Internet.
A recent report from Symantec, based on investigating more than 1.3 billion emails and 176 million documents spanning 20,000 cloud apps, found that Microsoft’s Office 365, Google and Dropbox were the most commonly used cloud apps among enterprises during 2016.
That same report also presented a IT executives have on cloud usage among employees, saying:
“At the end of 2016, the average enterprise organization was using 928 cloud apps, up from 841 earlier in the year. However, most CIOs think their organizations only use around 30 or 40 cloud apps.”
That’s a surprising lack of understanding and oversight. These figures alone truly underscore the need for a third party hosting solution for the applications your business uses every day.
For smaller companies, there are numerous advantages to using hosted applications.
They include:
- The responsibility of managing the application lies with the vendor. You simply buy licenses for the application.
- Since the application is already installed and running in the cloud, you can get a license and begin instantaneously using the application.
- Applications are kept updated so that users use the most recent version.
- The service provider can see which areas of the application are used most heavily and where any bottlenecks are being experienced. This ensures that application development is closely tailored to emerging user requirements.
Instead of buying software, utilizing hosted applications allows you to essentially rent it. This transfers the costs from being a capital expense (Capex) to an operating expense (Opex), making your potential tax burden much lower. If your company uses SaaS for most of its operations, this solution will likely offer additional savings.
That’s why MDL Technology acts as an interface to help you. While you may be new to cloud computing, we’re not. We’ll help you select and license a solution that is appropriate to your needs and work with you to ensure you get the best out of the licenses you pay for. We’ll work for you to ensure you get the best possible capabilities from the cloud. Learn more about our cloud services services here.
