Identifying SaaS Operational Challenges for IT

Course Overview
(Music) Hi everyone. My name is Sonia Cuff, and welcome to my course, Identifying SaaS Operational Challenges for IT. I'm a Microsoft MVP and technology consultant at my own company, The Missing Chair. There's a perception that Software as a Service applications are supported by the vendor with no need for your IT department to get involved. This course is going to explore where SaaS can impact your IT operations. Some of the major topics that we will cover include what you can and can't control with a SaaS application, integrating SaaS with your existing IT systems, and the touchpoints between SaaS and your IT processors. By the end of this course, you'll understand how to integrate SaaS applications into your IT operations to ensure that they are visible and managed. Before beginning this course, you should have a basic knowledge of IT infrastructure and standard IT operational tasks. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn about the touchpoints of SaaS applications, with the Identifying SaaS Operational Challenges for IT course, at Pluralsight.

Operating a SaaS Solution
Welcome to Identifying SaaS Operational Challenges for IT. I'm Sonia Cuff, a Microsoft MVP and technical consultant with my own business in Brisbane, Australia. Software as a Service applications are marketed as being easy to use and requiring very little IT involvement. In this course, we'll look at some of the challenges that do crop up that might need to the IT department to get involved. But first, meet Sarah. She's our IT Operations Manager at the Wired Brain Coffee Company. Sarah's business has decided to use a SaaS application that's going to be mission-critical, and she wants to make sure that her IT team are prepared. In this course, we'll take a look at some of the benefits that Software as a Service applications do have that favor the IT department. We'll see where SaaS fits in to your technology stack, and we'll look at some of the processes involved with using a SaaS application that the IT department might be needed for. I'm going to start with this warning. Your results may vary. And I say this because not all Software as a Service applications are created equal. SaaS applications have different installation methods, different access methods, and different levels of involvement that the IT department can or can't have, so it's going to be up to you to apply what you learn in this course to your particular scenario.

Understanding the SaaS Technology Stack
Welcome back to Identifying SaaS Operational Challenges for IT. I'm Sonia Cuff, and in this module we're going to explore the Software as a Service technology stack, what are all of the components that make the software able to be delivered as a service, and what do you need to be responsible for? Remember Sarah, she's our IT Operations Manager at the Wired Brain Coffee Company. Sarah is upscaling her staff to support a Software as a Service application for the business. Our Gartner definition for Software as a Service focuses on a provider delivering software that is based on one set of common code and data definitions and consumed on a one-to-many model by contracted customers. In essence, it's a way for an application vendor hire out their software code, but as a fully operational and functional system that's being used by more than one customer across the same infrastructure. This is a big difference to what some of the Wired Brain Coffee Company staff are used to where they've been responsible for looking after all of the infrastructure components from the hardware right through to the application. In this module, you'll learn about what components the vendor is managing in their own datacenter, what parts of the application they're looking after, some extra components that they need to manage to make the software available as a subscription service, and how we can break down what the vendor is responsible for and what Sarah's team at the Wired Brain Coffee Company still needs to manage.