Assessing network access decisions for SaaS offerings
Understanding your market
The decisions you make now about networking determine whether the value proposition of your SaaS product can be delivered to your customers. Despite the strategic importance of these decisions, providing access to your SaaS offering is often perceived as a purely technological topic. The risk this perception carries includes prolonged revenue recognition cycles, operational inefficiencies, and misalignment with business strategy. For instance, if rapid expansion is a strategic business objective, then a guiding light of your decision-making process should be whether the solutions you are considering are scalable and flexible enough to support the expansion. Even if you are successful in growing your business, operational overhead must not become a roadblock for future growth, and a misaligned cost structure could consume all of your profits.
For example, consider how the following market considerations affect technical aspects of the product, such as networking:
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If your business model is subscription-based, your customers are likely to prefer solutions with predictable, recurring costs rather than large, upfront investments.
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If your business strategy targets high-value, enterprise-level customers, then security, governance and regulatory compliance criteria determine whether your SaaS offering will even be considered.
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If your target market is mostly startups, ease of integration, time to value, and adaptability are likely important factors. Startups typically prioritize speed and agility. Because they need to build a brand and need to generate profits quickly, they are likely to prefer solutions that are fast and easy to integrate, can cost-effectively scale, reduce dependency on experts, and do not tie up precious cycles.
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Some businesses require stable, high-throughput, and low-latency access. This includes the entertainment and media industry, manufacturing, and financial transaction processing. If these are your target customers, reliability is their primary concern.
In all of these cases, customers might perceive an otherwise healthy SaaS offering if networking access isn't seamless. If networking becomes an obstacle, this doesn't support your business case. If your customers can't reliably access the services you offer, the value proposition of your SaaS offerings is nil.
Understanding your role
Your role in supporting business objectives depends on who you are, what your specific individual and team objectives are, and who your customers are, and what's important to them. Even if you are not part of a team that typically interacts with customers, you need to be concerned with who they are and what they need. Engineering and development teams must also be concerned with their internal customers, especially those who they interact with on a regular basis. Typically, these are the operations and customer success teams.
If you are part of a sales organization, it's essential that you communicate with product and engineering teams about networking, even though it's a seemingly pure technology topic. Share insights about the structure of the target market. Communicate pain points and the needs of your existing and potential customers and partners. Share data and anecdotes about missed opportunities, predicted growth per segment, and events. Ask questions that challenge your organization's capability to support business growth. This increases the number of opportunities and improves the long-term profitability of your business. Ultimately, this helps your organization fund future expansion and development.
If you are part of the engineering organization, understand the business strategy of your organization before attempting to draft a solution. Alignment with the business strategy helps you choose the right metrics to evaluate different network access options. It can also prevent an expensive, large-scale network redesign as your organization grows. Business alignment helps your team secure and retain the resources required for future challenges. Your team's headcount, budget for professional development, or access to cutting-edge technology is going to depend on your ability to demonstrate business alignment. Ideally, you can show how your decisions contributed to the business success of the organization. Therefore, we suggest that you capture the decision-making process, including metric selection criteria. Periodically review your metrics to confirm that they align with business objectives. This can help your team get the credit that they deserve. Periodic reviews also help validate that your team isn't making decisions based on assumptions or obsolete, historical reasons.
The list of metrics in the following sections is relevant to networking access:
This guide uses a subset of these metrics throughout to help you identify the optimal network access approaches for your SaaS offerings. Choose the metrics that are most important and relevant to your business, and then evaluate the approaches based on those metrics.
