Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can seem attractive - low upfront costs, ease of implementation, transfer of application-support work and costs from customer to provider, and potential head-count reductions -, but it can lead the business to purchase and deploy SaaS applications without considering their long-term impact on the enterprise. However, SaaS providers do stop trading, e.g. cloud storage services including SaaS lines at storage giants Iron Mountain and EMC. Corporate treasury departments must have a plan for where they'd go if the provider shut down.

Also what will be the cost if 'everyone' uses the service, not just corporate treasury staff? The cheap $50 per user becomes expensive if the number of users is 500, not the expected five treasury staff.

 

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SaaS can be very useful, and in some services, the only way of receiving the service/system, but departments need to understand precisely what they are buying.