On Using Software as a Service to Deploy an Early Warning Service

This paper was motivated by the involvement of the authors in a case study aiming at deploying an early warning system (EWS) for water treatment plants in Ireland using the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. The goal of this paper is twofold. At first, it attempts to clarify the relationship between the SaaS business model and other cloud computing technologies and to point out the advantages of SaaS over on-premises software. The second goal is to propose a novel early warning service architecture for critical infrastructures that will hinge on the SaaS business model in order to be deployed over the Web. The novelty of our project lies in the fact that it will propose a new approach based on the SaaS business model to provide an EWS for water treatment plant operations in Ireland that will be accessible over the Web.