SaaS Applications Research Articles

Implementation of Cloud Native Architecture in PT XYZ's Accounting System

Microservices are commonly used as an architectural style in SaaS applications. Compared to monolithic architectures, they offer various advantages, such as fault tolerance mechanisms, scalability, and ease of customization. However, microservice architectures cannot stand alone. This is because microservices are based on distributed services and data isolation, and such systems will rely heavily on supporting infrastructure, Therefore, a cloud-native architecture is necessary, taking a philosophical approach to building applications that can fully leverage the cloud-native application model, with the microservice architecture style as one of the key components. This study delves into the integration of cloud-native architecture into the accounting system application of PT XYZ, an IT company specializing in consulting and software integration. The researcher examined the five elements of cloud-native architecture, evaluated them using the twelve-factor app, and identified areas for improvement for PT XYZ

Learning management systems for higher education: a brief comparison

The learning management system (LMS) is a software based on SAAS, internet navigator, or user application, which manage the teaching and learning of an academic or non-academic program. This work presents a comparison of 45 LMSs. The objective of this research is to report a study of the LMS developed for higher education. This objective is addressed by considering all LMSs with online access to information. For the comparison study, an evaluation criteria has been developed based on the literature review from the past 20 years. This evaluation methodology is based on Software Quality and Teaching-Learning tools for online educational platforms (SQTL), it is composed by six criteria: interoperability, accessibility, productivity tools, communication tools, learning tools, finally with the security standards and certifications. The maximum sum of SQTL score is 10 points and the minimum 0. The best LMS according to the comparison are Paradiso and Moodle with 9.50 and 9.25 points, respectively. Paradiso has around 1 million users and Moodle over 250 millions. The Google Sheets with the collected raw data and SQTL scores are available in https://shorturl.at/wqDWk.

Analysis and selection of methods for customizing SAAS solutions built using Cloud-Native technologies

The subject of the study is the methods of customization of SaaS solutions. The purpose of the article is to determine a holistic strategy for customizing SaaS solutions developed using cloud-native technologies. Objectives: to analyze modern approaches to the architecture of SaaS applications; to identify the main methods of customization for modern SaaS applications; to investigate and establish a method for customizing the interface of SaaS applications; based on the study, to determine a comprehensive strategy for customizing SaaS applications. The following methods are implemented: analysis and synthesis - to study the technologies that are used to build SaaS applications; abstraction and generalization - to determine the overall architecture of the SaaS application; synthesis of web technologies - to select methods of customization of SaaS applications and build an algorithm for selecting a customization method. Results achieved: the modern architecture of SaaS applications is studied; methods of customization of SaaS applications are selected, and a holistic strategy for customization of SaaS applications is defined; a method for modifying the interface of SaaS applications is determined, which allows customization of the web interface of a SaaS application regardless of the specific front-end framework. Conclusions: modern architecture of SaaS applications is complex and based on microservice architecture, multi-tenant approach, cloud technologies and web browser; methods of customization of SaaS applications should be developed independently of certain technology stacks to meet the customization needs of most or all users of SaaS applications; the API-first approach is fundamental in building a customized SaaS, as it is the basis for creating any automation or related business logic; webhooks are the best option for implementing subscriptions to events occurring in a SaaS application, regardless of the technology stack; a defined strategy for customizing SaaS applications allows customization regardless of a particular technology stack and, in addition to implementing business logic, also covers interface modifications.

Detection of Shadow IT Incidents for Centralized IT Management in Enterprises using Statistical and Machine Learning Algorithms

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software service where software solutions are offered to users via the internet, usually subscription-based or sometimes opened to access by selling a license key, distributed over the cloud, and updates are automatically delivered to users because they are distributed over the cloud. The number of SaaS provider companies is increasing day by day, and with this increase, unauthorized purchase of SaaS applications has become a problem for corporate-sized companies. Without the company's approval, SaaS software and hardware used by employees increase Shadow IT which means there is a potential risk of security breaches, data loss, and compliance issues as the IT department is unaware of the usage and unable to monitor and control the systems effectively. In this study, in order to avoid the problems that may be caused by Shadow IT, unauthorized SaaS applications in Arçelik Global have been detected by utilizing statistical and machine learning approaches. In the experiment, Interquartile Range, K-Means and Stabilization algorithms were used for the detection of unauthorized SaaS applications. Using all three algorithms, low, medium and high-risk shadow IT detection was made for Arçelik company. We see that the proposed stabilization approach explores unauthorized SaaS applications much more distinctively than the other two algorithms. The proposed approach can be used in the future to detect unauthorized software from other companies.

How software as a service simultaneously affords organizational agility and inertia

Although cloud computing is associated with organizational agility, anecdotal evidence points to resistance to cloud computing by employees in information technology (IT) units. We explored the links between software as a service (SaaS) and organizational agility by conducting two stages of interviews with key informants in large organizations, and by employing affordance and inertia-theoretical lenses. Two basic affordances emerged from the retroductive data analysis – implementing quickly and sourcing independently – which in turn yielded two higher-level affordances: trialing alternatives and self-organizing business teams. We developed a model that explains how and why these four affordances enhance agility by accelerating the sensing-to-acting process of organizations. We also describe how five categories of organizational inertia in IT units hinder agility. Our main contribution is how adopting SaaS applications enables organizational agility while highlighting the role of IT unit inertia in SaaS affordance actualization processes.

A Conceptual Cloud Forensic Investigation Process Model for Software as a Service(SaaS) Applications

This paper explore a structured and systematic approach cloud forensic investigation process model for SaaS applications, to investigate the digital crimes in the cloud environment and contributing to enhanced security and privacy of acquired data during forensic investigation .The proposed model offers the distinctive characteristics of cloud environments and the varying levels of access and control within them. In this proposed model, the systematic forensic investigation process is detailed with microscopic details with four phases namely the initial phase, the acquisition phase, the analysis phase, and the reporting phase in Cloud environment. Ultimately, this research aims to enhance the overall trustworthiness and reliability of SaaS applications forensic for fostering a safer and more secure cloud computing forensic investigation landscape by using the chain of custody.

Securing a SaaS application on AWS Cloud

Securing a SaaS application on AWS Cloud

A Flow-Based Advanced Rule Generation for Detecting User Action in SaaS Application

A Flow-Based Advanced Rule Generation for Detecting User Action in SaaS Application

The Benefits and Challenges of Customization within SaaS Cloud Solutions

The Benefits and Challenges of Customization within SaaS Cloud Solutions

AN ENHANCED SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS) ARCHITECTURAL MODEL FOR CLOUD BASED SECURITY USING HYBRID SYMMETRIC ALGORITHM

Protecting cloud data from security breaches, preventing and ensuring safe cloud data is concealed from unauthorized access or infiltration by unwanted users are all part of cloud infrastructure security. This proposed technique is based on ensuring data confidentiality by adding extra-layer of security from the client side, developing a framework that implements the AES 256-bit key and Fernet 128-bits algorithms, which encrypt and decrypt files via random algorithm selection during uploads and downloads. When a file is uploaded to the cloud, the decryption key is recorded in the local server's file log. The software use randomized algorithm selection to provide security to ensure that an attacker having a prior link cannot reset the user account since the attacker cannot guess the token. Furthermore, invalidating this token ensures that the link cannot be used more than once if it was previously logged anywhere. To propose and verify the efficiency of the model the results generated(in quantitative values) are frequency (monobit) testing, with a minimum bit size of 64, given the P-values derived from the above study (i.e., 0.8838, 0.6187, 0.3768, 0.2817, 0.5843, 0.4167). The findings reveal throughput for encryption of 0.91531 and for decryption of 0.4854, space complexity of 0.4854, and entropy of 7.942616667.This research work studies the design of a robust, adaptable, and non-deterministic SaaS application that can be secure for enterprises and subsequent research studies will be conducted in the development.

The influence of customer involvement and engagement on co-creation of services, satisfaction, and loyalty: The case of Software as a Service

Software as a digital product has been shown to improve companies’ performance and efficiency. One product that is now at the core of many businesses is Software as a Service (SaaS). By utilizing cloud computing platforms, SaaS is a method of providing applications as a service. SaaS applications have unique characteristics that can be customized to meet customers’ needs. Hence, SaaS has become suitable for companies of all types and sizes, including small- and medium-sized enterprises. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of customer involvement on the development of SaaS applications and the impact of customer engagement on the co-creation of services, satisfaction, and loyalty, with the co-creation level used as a moderating variable. Data were collected from responses to an online questionnaire by 282 users of a SaaS application in Indonesia who were the decision-makers of the selected SaaS provider. The data were then analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results show that customer involvement in developing SaaS applications significantly positively affects the co-creation of services, satisfaction, and loyalty (t-value > 1.645). Moreover, the level of co-creation was proven to strengthen the impact of customer involvement on the co-creation of services with an interaction Standardize Loading Factor (SLF) path of 1.36. Hence, the findings indicate that higher customer involvement promotes collaborative activities with service providers, and the optimum level of co-creation raises customer satisfaction.

Software As Service Attack Detection and Prevention using Manipulated QR Code

A sort of software service delivery paradigm known as "software as a service" (SaaS) includes a wide variety of commercial possibilities and problems. Despite being drawn to SaaS by its advantages, users and service providers are reluctant to incorporate their businesses into it because of security concerns. This article emphasizes the usefulness and adaptability of SaaS in a variety of situations, such as software defined networking, cloud computing, mobile cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. The examination of SaaS security issues, including data security, application security, and SaaS deployment security, is then started. Potential solutions or strategies that may be used in conjunction with one another are then offered for a secure SaaS platform. The SQL injection attack is the SaaS application's most dangerous vulnerability. This might result in sensitive and important data loss. (e.g., financial, personal). Through these kinds of assaults, attackers might steal sensitive information that is crucial to a business or organization, which has a detrimental effect on both physical (like data) and intangible (like reputation) assets. This research aims to investigate the viability of using machine learning techniques for application-level SQL injection detection. Various dangerous and benign payloads were utilized to train the classifiers employed in the testing methodologies. They detect if a payload includes malicious code when given one. This study aims to identify harmful activities in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment based on the cloud. The anti-phishing advice for this technique, which is known as a secure QR code, includes a thorough analysis of the most current research on the usability and security of QR codes. The most important use cases and accompanying attack paths were identified. To do this, we conducted a comprehensive literature study. Social engineering, or phishing, is the fraud that exploits QR codes as an attack vector most often covered in the media. The usage of QR codes on smartphones has spread from auto production plants.

Managing Software‐as‐a‐Service: Pricing and operations

Software‐as‐a‐service (SaaS) applications have experienced a decade of explosive growth, eliminating barriers in reaching users and enabling real‐time interchanges and intelligence. Using business analytics, SaaS applications are increasingly embedded in the day‐to‐day activities of businesses and consumers with competition and innovative pricing. Due to the evolution in cloud business models, new issues are surfacing to challenge practitioners and scholars. A number of issues encountered in the practice have not been properly addressed or even recognized. In this paper, we attempt to fill this important gap. We propose a framework of recent business research on SaaS in light of wide adoption of the SaaS business model. This framework broadly classifies SaaS research into two basic themes. For each theme, we review past work that has been instrumental in setting the direction of this line of research and discuss how emerging research opportunities can be addressed. For each research opportunity, we also propose an initial model and the applicable methodology. Further, in order to aid researchers, we identify the data sources wherever applicable, and even present some of the initial results. We conclude by describing promising directions on a roadmap for future research and explain why an integrative perspective of operations, marketing, and information systems is critical to SaaS. In this paper, we bridge the gap between research and practice by identifying the relevant industry problems that would help researchers who are interested in working in this area both to get a starting point and to address important theoretical and practical challenges.

SaaS application mashup based on High Speed Message Processing

SaaS application mashup based on High Speed Message Processing

Secure Cloud Services by Integrating CASB Based Approach

In the last decades, cloud computing has attracted much attention in business, as it provides numerous computing functions (e.g., Software-as-a- Service (SaaS), Platform as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Shadow IT refers to the use of cloud apps and services without the explicit approval of IT. Early on, the practice was one of the main drivers of Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) adoption. There are two risks we found, they are i.) Users typically use unapproved software-as-a- service (SaaS) applications for file sharing, social media, collaboration and web conferencing. Ii.) Another growing challenge, third-party apps and scripts with OAuth permissions. OAuth-connected third-party apps access IT-approved cloud services, such as Microsoft 365 and Google G Suite. Some of these pose risks because of poor design, giving them broader than necessary data permissions. The danger of OAuth is once a token is authorized, access to enterprise data and applications continues until it’s revoked—even if the user’s password is changed. Integrating CASB solution into broader web security infrastructure can provide deeper visibility into all unapproved web apps. Keywords: cloud computing, insider threats, web security, CASB, OAuth

Autoscaling Pods on an On-Premise Kubernetes Infrastructure QoS-Aware

Cloud systems and microservices are becoming powerful tools for businesses. The evidence of the advantages of offering infrastructure, hardware or software as a service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) is overwhelming. Microservices and decoupled applications are increasingly popular. These architectures, based on containers, have facilitated the efficient development of complex SaaS applications. A big challenge is to manage and design microservices with a massive range of different facilities, from processing and data storage to computing predictive and prescriptive analytics. Computing providers are mainly based on data centers formed of massive and heterogeneous virtualized systems, which are continuously growing and diversifying over time. Moreover, these systems require integrating into current systems while meeting the Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. The primary purpose of this work is to present an on-premise architecture based on Kubernetes and Docker containers aimed at improving QoS regarding resource usage and service level objectives (SLOs). The main contribution of this proposal is its dynamic autoscaling capabilities to adjust system resources to the current workload while improving QoS.

SAAS parallel task scheduling based on cloud service flow load algorithm

In cloud platform applications, the user’s goal is to obtain high-quality application services, while the service provider’s goal is to obtain revenue by performing the tasks submitted by the user. The platform built by the service provider’s application resources needs to improve the mapping between service requests and resources to achieve higher value. Through the current situation of resource management in the cloud environment, it is found that many task scheduling and resource allocation algorithms are still affected by factors such as the diversity, dynamics, and multiple constraints of resources and tasks. This paper focuses on Software as a Service (SaaS) applications’ task scheduling and resource configuration in a dynamic and uncertain cloud environment. It is a challenging online scheduling problem to automatically and intelligently allocate user task requests that continually reach SaaS applications to appropriate resources for execution. To this end, a real-time task scheduling method based on deep reinforcement learning is proposed, which automatically and intelligently allocates user task requests that continually reach SaaS applications to appropriate resources for execution. In this way, the limited virtual machine resources rented by SaaS providers can be used in a balanced and efficient manner. In the experiment, by comparing with other five task scheduling algorithms, it is proved that the algorithm proposed in this paper not only improves the execution efficiency of better deploying workflow in IaaS public cloud, but also makes the resources provided by SaaS are used in a balanced and efficient manner.

Software as a service and security

Nowadays, Cloud Computing is an important hi-tech research area in the most recent innovation. These advancements give clients a few benefits: cost-adequacy, effective asset usage, cooperation, catastrophe recuperation, and elite. Cloud offers administrations for processing on a solitary mouse click. The overview was completed in the type of an online survey. This examination paper exhibits that SaaS is safer than other web applications. SaaS is superior to different applications and SaaS is savvy. This Research paper investigates the significance of SaaS for productive distributed computing for associations and its suggestions. This examination paper additionally talks about the significance of SaaS application engineering, usefulness, proficiency, benefits, and weaknesses.

Enterprise SaaS Workloads on New-Generation Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) on Multi-Cloud Platforms

Cloud Computing has become the primary model used by DevOps practitioners and researchers to provision infrastructure in minimal time. But recently, the traditional method of using a single cloud provider has fallen out of favor due to several limitations regarding performance, compliance rules, geographical reach, and vendor lock-in. To address these issues, industry and academia are implementing multiple clouds (i.e., multi-cloud). However, managing the infrastructure provisioning of enterprise SaaS applications faces several challenges, such as configuration drift and the heterogeneity of cloud providers. This has seen Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) technologies being used to automate the deployment of SaaS applications. IaC facilitates the rapid deployment of new versions of application infrastructures without degrading quality or stability. Therefore, this work presents a vision of uniformly managing the infrastructure provisioning of enterprise SaaS applications that utilize multiple cloud providers. Hence, we introduce an initial design for the IaC-based Multi-Cloud Deployment pattern and discuss how it addresses the relative challenges.

Empirical Investigation of Key Factors for SaaS Architecture

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has received significant attention from software providers and users as a software delivery model. Most of the existing companies are transferring their business into a SaaS model. This intensely competitive environment has imposed many challenges for SaaS developers and vendors. SaaS development is a very complex process and SaaS success depends on its architecture design and development. This paper provides a better understanding of SaaS applications architecture phase during the SaaS development process. It focuses mainly on an empirical investigation of key factors of SaaS Architecture phase identified from the systematic literature review. A quantitative survey was developed and conducted to identify key architecture factors for an improved and successful SaaS application. A developed survey was used to test the proposed hypothesis presented in this study. Empirical investigation's results provide evidence that vendors and developers must consider key architecture factors for SaaS development process to stand in the current competitive environment. These key factors include customization, scalability, MTA (Multi-Tenancy Architecture), security, integration, and fault tolerance and recovery management. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of identified key factors of the architecture on SaaS applications success.