ITPEC FE Morning April 2018 Question 62

Data migration cost — with SaaS the provider owns and runs the software and servers, but moving the company's existing data into the service is still the customer's cost.

TCO is everything a system costs over its life: introduction, operation, maintenance and disposal. Under SaaS the customer pays a usage fee for an application the provider has already built and hosts; the provider's servers, installation and version upgrades are covered by that fee. What stays on the customer's side is the work around adopting the service: migrating data from the old system, setting up and training users, and the network connection. Data migration is therefore part of the customer's TCO for SaaS.

Answer (b)

Why not others:

• •(a) — installing upgrades is done by the provider on its own platform; the customer never installs the software
• •(c) — SaaS offers software that already exists, so the customer does not pay to develop new software
• •(d) — the servers that host the software belong to the provider, whose investment is recovered through the fee, not bought by the customer

Key rule: For any cloud model, list which layers the provider runs; the customer's TCO is the fee plus the work left on its own side, such as data migration, user setup and training.

System Strategy · AI-written, may contain errors