GSA Schedule | Government Business Development | Government | Technology | Resources and Insight | Contracts | 1 Min Read
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for IT Help desks is no longer a foreign concept to government agencies. This solution can help provide improved government service to citizens from an environment entirely in the cloud. However, many questions of cost benefit and scalability still remain. With the long term ramifications of budget cuts and sequestration slowly taking a strangling hold on government procurement, agencies are scrambling to find new ways to “save a buck.”
This has pushed the SaaS versus on-premise implementation models to a debate at the forefront of government IT strategies. The SaaS model brings with it the promise of lower upfront investment, reduced staffing and lower maintenance expense. Along with those benefits however comes the question of scalability. Most organizations feel they are either too big for SaaS or SaaS is too robust for them. But is size really an accurate limitation?
SaaS is most often presented as an ideal option for a small to medium size organization for a variety of flexibility factors. However it is those same flexibility factors that can mold a SaaS solution to fit a large organization or agency. SaaS allows the agency to have a solution that is the “Pay-As-You-Grow” model. In other words, by only paying for the applications used, the solution can be scaled as large or as small as needed, without worrying about having potential unused endpoints or other inefficiencies. In addition with all the improvement in highly secure datacenters, security concerns are at a minimum no matter what the size.
On the commercial side, enterprises as large as Salesforce.com and Allied Wireless Communications Corporation have proven that a large scale SaaS implementation for an IT help desk can be successful and hugely cost beneficial. Their model of success is a blueprint to pave the way for large scale government organizations to take advantage of these same cost benefits.
