Since many problems are common to just about any business – think payroll, HR, or CRM – they can be optimized across a customer base via the SaaS provider. Sure, your business will have its own unique needs, but 90 percent of the problem has been tackled before. If all you’re left with is that 10 percent that’s unique to you, the problem is practically solved. The net effect is that SaaS helps a small or mid-sized organization receive the efficiencies of scale common to a large enterprise.

Business-focused SaaS allows SMBs to function as virtual enterprises. Think of it as the Wikipedia for business processes. Wikipedia relies on the expertise of a vast user-base to provide an online encyclopedia that is broad, exhaustive and accurate. Critics have questioned the accuracy of Wikipedia, but a study in Nature late last year found it every bit as accurate as traditional encyclopedias.

Business-focused SaaS vendors rely on a similar equation. SaaS providers reel in knowledge from their vast customer base, automate common business processes, and, in turn, make each small customer savvy and experienced by default. Common business problems are automated and streamlined–and available on demand.

Another misconception about SaaS is that it’s not secure. The truth is SaaS is far more secure than your typical enterprise network. It’s a trust issue. People trust those within their organization but are leery of outsourcing key information. However, think of it this way: is it safer to store your money under your mattress or in a bank?

Most of us will choose a bank, not just because it’s harder to break into, but it also has additional layers of protection such as FDIC insurance. Similarly, information stored in a SaaS provider’s data center has layered security around it, continuous backups, and automated disaster recovery.

These benefits extend to other areas of concern, such as regulatory compliance and supporting remote users, as well. Since compliance is a problem common across the SaaS customer base, compliance and auditing become inherent to your application infrastructure, rather than add-ons that are cumbersome, chaotic, and difficult to understand. Similarly, remote support is secure and stable, removing the burden of managing VPN software or worrying about weak authentication schemes.

The bottom line is that SaaS is a platform tightly linked to your bottom line. Business-focused SaaS provides executives with precise, quantifiable, real-time insights into critical business metrics. All key data is centralized in one easily accessed system, so managers have instant answers to difficult business questions, such as historical and projected utilization rates, how profitable different projects and clients are, and whether or not the organization is on track to meet timelines and budgets.

In a SaaS ecosystem, it’s all just information, after all, but the trick is extracting that information in a meaningful way. As with security, compliance, and support, that’s built into the platform. It’s no longer a far-off business goal, but a common, automated business process.

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