 - Storage as a Service (SaaS) is a business model in which third-party providers rent space on their storage to end users that lack the capital budget and/or technical personnel to implement and maintain their own storage infrastructure. There is nothing new about third-party storage services, but the complexity of today's backup, replication, and disaster recovery needs has renewed their popularity, particularly among small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).
The key advantage to SaaS is cost savings. Storage space is basically rented from the provider using a cost-per-gigabyte stored or cost-per-data transferred model. There is no capital expenditure for the end user who pays only for the storage that they use. A customer uses client software to specify the backup set and then transfers data to the service provider across a WAN (wide-area network). When data loss occurs, the customer can retrieve the lost data from the service provider. In extreme cases, the service provider can copy data to a new set of disks which are then shipped to the customer.
SaaS also stands for Software as a Service.
| CONTRIBUTORS: |
Stephen J. Bigelow |
| LAST UPDATED: |
12 Jul 2007
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