A rapidly growing trend for both small and large companies is the use of Software as a Service (SaaS).

SaaS provides software to customers as an on-demand service rather than the traditional method of delivery software as an on-site installation with upfront costs. Unlike traditional software licensing, where you buy a license and subsequent upgrades, SaaS typically involves yearly or monthly fees to allow access to the software. Once the end user terminates the agreement and stops paying the fee, they no longer have access to the software. SaaS software usually resides either on the software creator’s servers or on a partner’s servers, not at the customer’s site.

As a method of deploying software, SaaS offers both immediate and long-term benefits to staffing and recruiting firms.

First, using SaaS gives you access to powerful software programs and the latest technology without having the expense of a large IT staff and time-consuming expensive upgrades.

In addition to the “pay-as-you-go” or “on-demand” payment options, SaaS deployment is completely hosted — and managed in some cases — by your software vendor and is accessible to you over the Internet. You’ll face few of the headaches of dealing with internal staffing, performance or system issues that come with managing an enterprise application in-house.

Second, your upfront costs will be lower while your ROI will be higher. Because SaaS is based on a subscription model, the initial investment is much lower than traditional enterprise deployment. You save further by eliminating capital expenditures, and by avoiding the hardware expenses necessary in an enterprise software deployment.

SaaS eliminates the need for an internal IT staff, saving you substantial dollars in salary and benefit expenses. The SaaS deployment model enables you to focus on what you do best: staffing and recruiting – your revenue-generating activities.

Third, SaaS gives you options for customization and a high amount of flexibility. Some SaaS vendors offer extensive customization of your staffing or recruiting software. This gives business users the best of both worlds — virtually unlimited customization and/or integration capability combined with a vendor controlled and maintained source code base.

Fourth, SaaS helps protect your company from data loss. Mpst provide multiple levels of hardware redundancy and data backups, so even if one or more servers go down, your data is likely to be safe and/or recoverable. Make sure that your vendor uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). This enables them to proactively monitor all of your hardware devices.

You can ensure that your vendor protects your data through state-of-the-art firewalls and secure access to the application servers so there is no public exposure of sensitive personnel data. Ask your vendor who has access to your database. It should be limited to specific software vendor personnel.

Additionally, if the staffing software solution you are looking at includes email integration, make sure to assess email security. Your vendor should have the ability to encrypt email and product data with a 128-bit SSL certificate as well as provide up-to-date email security software.

SaaS is often considered the smart method for companies that want to lower costs, speed implementation, improve ROI and reduce the IT headaches that sometimes come with deploying software. eEmpACT staffing software offers a variety of connection options, including hosted SaaS and on-site. Let us help you choose the right solution for your staffing software needs. Contact us today to find out more about how our software can streamline both your front-office and back-office functions.