An arrangement that provides protection to the business should the software provider go out of business or discontinue support and/or maintenance[1] for the licensed software. In the event of such an occurrence, the licensee gets the source code of the software. This may be more important in a SaaS[2] or cloud[3] environment where, if the software vendor goes out of business, the data[4] may be lost as well.
The ongoing task of operating and maintaining a new system after the initial implementation including auditing, updating and upgrading.
A model for the distribution of software where customers access software over the Internet. In SaaS, a service provider hosts the application at its data center and a customer accesses it via a standard Web browser. Three characteristics that apply to most SaaS vendors are: updates are applied automatically without customer intervention, the service is purchased on a subscription basis and no hardware is required to be installed by the customer.
