Ask HN: How are enterprise tier SaaS products deployed?

9 points·ndcrandall··3 comments

Most SaaS products are run on your servers for clients, but with enterprise clients they may need to run your product internally for various reasons (security, server accesss, etc.)

What are your suggestions for deploying a web app SaaS product internally? Wouldn't securing your source be a cause for concern?

I know places like Github offer this, but I'm not too familiar with the details.

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You secure your source via your license. And a lawyer named Saul.

Really though, most enterprises aren't interested in stealing your source. If you have features they want to modify, they'll probably negotiate a source-code license with you (think: "I get to buy a beach house if this deal goes through")

I overlooked the license that would be created for hosting the source internally. That seems like a good route. I also agree that most enterprise clients wouldn't be interested in stealing the source.

It may just be a legal issue, along with a manual process of checking out the code and installing it on a VM they setup.

Enterprises have recently been accelerating adoption of hybrid-cloud models for certain types of SaaS products.

With enterprise cloud server backup, for example, customers deploy Zetta.net's agents on their servers, and it backs up data to our offsite cloud data centers, and to the customers own local storage.

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