Cloud computing: Software as a service

At present, SaaS(Software as a Service) is a new mantra for many software industries and individuals. How software can be offered as a service? What are the requirements and issues of SaaS? What is architectural difference between SaaS, and other cloud computing models? What are the implementation challenges for SaaS? These are the few questions one need to answer while implementing SaaS. Offering software as a service actually minimizes the software piracy. It also makes software update and distribution process easy. Centrally maintaining a software in secure environment of CSP (Cloud Service Provider) frees the user from providing security to it. SaaS is an upper layer of cloud computing, so Cloud users do not require very high end computational power at their end. CSP provides it with SaaS. This helps in cost cutting at users' end, by reducing the amount of buying extra hardware for carrying their work. This paper is a brief review of SaaS, explaining its concept and requirements. SaaS, being a popular cloud computing model and emerging trend in technology usage, is exploited by many software developers and industries to deploy their software. This paper also discuss on how to implement a private SaaS using minimal resources at our hand implementation of private SaaS is useful for any institute in increasing its work efficiency while reducing the cost involved.