SAS or "software as a service" is becoming more common to the business platform day by day. As little as five years back the thought of running business centric software solutions over the web to a public service was unheard of, but with services such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps it is becoming more common place.

Leveraging SAS solutions allows businesses to lower their infrastructure and hosting costs as well as eliminate the need to constantly update software packages. Typically a maintenance solution is tied to these services and highly recommended to keep your organization ahead of the development curve.

On the flip side, SAS needs to be communicated and managed. It is easy to have updates that are commonly entered locally slip as the impedance of having to go external sometimes may be an issue. There may also be a an acceptance curve as some team members are not going to be familiar or comfortable making a change.

I would still highly recommend SAS solutions as they are easier to maintain, lower cost to manage, and offer a quick path to increase scale.

Have a great week!

Thanks
Abel