Page 70 - Cloud Essentials

The attraction of Software as a Service is that using it in its simplest form

requires only a web browser, a URL, an Internet connection, and credentials
such as a username and password. Ideally, this simplicity offers a lot more
device and location independence than applications that are developed and
deployed to a local office environment.
In reality, some limitations apply. For example, not every application is

conveniently accessed on mobile devices, and some applications are
actually very demanding in the number of browsers they need to work well.
This is depicted in Figure 3-3.

FIGURE 3-3 Software as a Service

SaaS applications may also need connections to other enterprise

applications. For example, an HR application would need personnel
records, while a sales application might need to share its order information
with a financial application. These connections might be made in one or
more of the following ways:

Uploading or downloading data sets You might migrate local data to

the cloud (upload) so that your cloud SaaS app can use it. For
disconnected users (a rarity these days in most parts of the world), data
can be downloaded to their devices so it is available to them when
they are offline.
Web services Cloud apps connect to each other using web standards

to exchange data, often in XML format. eXtensible Markup Language
(XML) uses data descriptor tags to present data in a simple fashion and
is used extensively to share data between dissimilar systems.

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