Architecting Software as a Service for Data Centric Cloud Applications

Software as a service (SaaS) is a new software development and deployment paradigm over the cloud. It offers Information Technology services dynamically as "on-demand" basis. The related application data are stored in the data centers managed by the Cloud Service Providers. Many enterprises are facing a major research challenge due to the unavailability of generic cloud architecture for designing, developing and deploying of cloud services. In this paper a flexible architecture for SaaS has been proposed, specifically for data centric cloud applications which may have access to heterogeneous types of databases. The architecture is composed of several layers, which are interacting with each other through the dynamically selected access points of the corresponding layers interfaces. The paper also enlisted the crucial features for SaaS architectural model. Moreover, a detailed comparative study has been done among the proposed SaaS architectural framework and other existing similar proposals based on the listed features.