SaaS solutions offer cost-effectiveness, flexibility, ease of implementation, upgrades, support, and accessibility from any device. These factors make them popular with companies that need to quickly access powerful tools and services without a significant upfront investment. If you want to follow the trends in SaaS development and create a really high-quality product, this article is for you. We will consider solutions, the use of which will improve the quality of any SaaS product.
How Do SaaS Products Affect People’s Lives?
SaaS products deliver value to humanity through accessibility, efficiency, collaboration, and innovation. They help companies and individuals achieve their goals, improve business processes, facilitate communication, and create new opportunities for development and growth. Let’s look at all the benefits of SaaS products:
- Improve collaboration and communication. SaaS products provide real-time collaboration and communication capabilities. They allow people to work on projects and tasks together, regardless of physical distance or location. This is especially important in a remote work environment and distributed teams, where employees can effectively collaborate, share information and coordinate their actions.
- Flexibility and scalability. SaaS products allow users to scale their operations according to their needs. They can easily adapt the number of licenses or resources based on changing requirements, which contributes to flexibility and cost efficiency.
- Fault tolerance. SaaS services typically provide high availability and data backup. In case of failures or data loss, users can rely on the infrastructure and recovery procedures provided by the SaaS provider.
- Reducing the ecological footprint. Using SaaS products can help reduce energy and resource consumption. By centralizing data storage and processing on the servers of SaaS providers, energy costs and environmental impact can be reduced.
Solutions to Improve Your SaaS Product
SaaS products deliver benefits including cost-effectiveness, flexibility, usability, continuous updates, and innovation that make them popular with businesses and end users. There are many trends in SaaS development and you should use them, as every SaaS product can be improved. Now we will look at solutions that will allow you to do this.
Add Role-Based Access Control
In large companies, heads of IT departments and information security departments, as a rule, pay great attention to the processes of providing access to corporate resources.
To do this, large companies use software that automates processes:
- issuance of identifiers
- granting access rights,
- suspension of access rights,
- revocation of access rights if an employee leaves or should no longer have access to certain data.
Your SaaS application should also be built into these processes. Therefore, to be ready for use in large companies, your service must offer role-based access control. A role is a set of access rights that a particular user receives.
What features should be in your SaaS solution:
- Services for registering and managing account settings.
- Ability to edit and create your own new roles and grant appropriate rights.
- Integration with software that is used in the company for access control and identification.
Use Single Sign-On Technology
According to the BetterCloud report, on average, one company with more than 1,000 employees uses more than 150 different SaaS applications. The use of outdated ways to enter the application through a login and password is becoming a problem for users. Employees have to remember (or store somewhere) the data of all accounts, and administrators have to centrally control factors such as password complexity, granting/revoking access, and so on. To avoid these inconveniences, use single sign-on technology, or Single Sign-On (SSO).
With SSO, after preliminary settings on the part of the SaaS application and the customer’s infrastructure, the employee uses a single corporate account. However, it does not share credentials and passwords with the vendor of every SaaS application used in the company.
What features should be in your SaaS solution:
- Support for standard protocols OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and SAML.
- Ability to synchronize data of corporate users
- Support for multi-factor authentication for secure user authentication.
Add Custom Audit Logs
Audit logs provide a centralized location for keeping track of all user activity in an application.
An important task of security professionals in large companies is to control and monitor access to corporate information. But what happens if some of the data moves to your SaaS product? Specialists cannot use additional agents to monitor infrastructure and SaaS applications. They only have to rely on a detailed log of all activity on behalf of employee accounts provided by the SaaS developer.
The audit trail can be used:
- to prevent suspicious activity if it is controlled
- to investigate account activity during an incident investigation.
Ensure Cyber Resilience
Determine the current security level of your SaaS application. Model all possible threats to its parts and infrastructure, consider different attack vectors, and find ways to eliminate or at least minimize possible risks.
Make an assessment in the following areas:
- Safe operation of the product. Think about creating a multi-layered protection, which will include network protection against DDoS attacks, firewalls to minimize the exposure of parts of the infrastructure to the Internet, and the protection of servers and databases.
- Secure product development. Security must be built into a SaaS application at the software development stage. Vulnerabilities found in a running application are much longer and more expensive to fix than if the same vulnerability would have been found at the development/testing stage.
- Safety of the company, employees, and contractors. No matter how secure an application is, no matter how carefully new releases are checked for the absence of threats, people are involved in its support. This means that you need to pay attention to the security of third-party applications (for example, those that store code) that your developers work with and the laptops from which they connect.
Demonstrate Compliance With Laws And Standards
You need an easy and scalable way to evaluate applications against multiple standards to achieve and demonstrate compliance with both regulatory and customer requirements.
Conclusion
A team of experienced professionals, including developers, designers, QA engineers, security experts is the key to creating a quality SaaS product. The team must have the necessary knowledge and skills to implement and successfully launch a SaaS product. If you’re looking for a reliable company to help you bring your SaaS idea to life, look to Gearheart. The company has successfully implemented many projects, following the trends in SaaS development, including LOOQME and SmartSuite.