The main objective of the thesis is to present SaaS business intelligence as a set of concepts and methods aimed at improvement of business decision making process based on Software as a Service model. To understand this, it's important to describe first general principles, on which are based conventional so-called on-premises solutions and the means how they work. It's also necessary to present Software as a Service as today's very popular software deployment model. Further objective is the description of these solutions, introduction of their strengths, weaknesses and guidelines how to choose a suitable service provider. Final objective of the thesis is to compare these two different methods of BI tools deployment, in that case on-premises and on-demand and to sketch out means, following them will be possible to decide for one of the methods.

The main objective is to implement integration application for contacts and communication that will meet the Cloud-ready specification, therefore is ready for deployment in a cloud computing environment. The thesis summarizes the recommendations of scientific papers, case studies and documentation from cloud providers for cloud-ready application. It also summarizes the methodology Twelve-Factor app, which brings together a set of recommendations for cloud applications. The second objective is to define specification of application to be implemented on the basis of identified persona and its problems will be transformed to specification and requirements. It is followed by design of the architecture to meet the principles for the run in the cloud environment. The fourth partial objective is to evaluate recovered principles, procedures and actual implementation. The main contribution of this work is implemented in an application that is able to integrate contacts and communication. Another contribution of this work is to summarize and validate basic recommendations on cloud ready application and methodology Twelve-factor app.

The diploma thesis conveys information enabling greater awareness on the role of open source software at the market of enterprise information systems such as ERP provided as a service. It presents their distinctive characteristics from proprietary software. The practical part investigates the use of corporate information systems provided on-premise, as web services, and by open software. It presents the opinion of the respondents on the contradictory factors considered as benefits or risks of such software.

The diploma thesis describes the process of CRM tool implementation project from project plan to the selection of an appropriate solution. The project is a result of cooperation with specific company. The main goal is to offer a solution of a software tool for managing relationship with business partners of company wholesale, more effective managing and controlling of wholesale representatives. The final solution is a result of consultations with company management, company wholesale representatives and representatives of CRM vendors. The benefit of this thesis is a solution of CRM tool, which is capable to solve actual problems and fulfill company requirements. The benefit is also a documented initial analysis and a process of selecting CRM tool in wholesale company. So the thesis could be used as basis for selection of CRM tool in other wholesale companies. The thesis is divided into theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part enlightens the topic of CRM. The practical part, which prevails in the text, consists of a project plan initial analysis, CRM market analysis and analysis of specific CRM tools.

Thesis is devoted on Business Intelligence tools in cloud, as one of the main trends of this area. BI tools in cloud have become widely used after companies begin to realize importance of data analysis for getting a competitive advantage. The high cost for implementation of a BI caused, that companies started discovering tools which can be implementing and operating with significantly lower costs and outside of their own infrastructure. The practical part of the thesis is focused on analysis and comparison currently using BI cloud tools. The analysis is based on practical examples which should test selected solutions for using at corporate sector of small and medium enterprises. Each of selected solutions is analyzed from several points of view and rated. Beside analysis is the next main goal of the thesis evaluation of best solution for companies and define potentials benefits and limitations which can follow implementation and operation.

Processes are running everywhere. Understanding and analyzing business and software processes and their interactions is critical if we wish to improve them. There are many event logs generated from Information Systems and applications related to fraud detection, healthcare processes, e-commerce processes, and others. These event logs are the starting point for process mining. Process mining aims to discover, monitor, and improve real processes by extracting knowledge from event logs available in information systems. Process mining provides fact-based insight from real event logs that helps analyze and improve existing business processes by answering, for example performance or conformance questions. As the number of applications developed in a cloud infrastructure (often called Software as a Service – SaaS at the application level) is increasing, it becomes essential and useful to study and discover these processes. However, SaaS applications bring new challenges to the problem of process mining. Using the Design Science Research Methodology, this thesis introduces a new method to study, discover, and analyze cloud-based application processes using process mining techniques. It explores the applications and known challenges related to process mining in cloud applications through a systematic literature review (SLR). It then contributes a new Application Programming Interface (API), with an implementation in R, and a companion method called Cloud Pattern API – Process Mining (CPA-PM), for the preprocessing of event logs in a way that addresses many of the challenges identified in the SLR. A case study involving a SaaS company and real event logs related to the trial process of their online service is used to validate the proposed solution.

Software as a service (SaaS) has become a common business model for application providers. However, this success has lead to scalability issues for service providers. Their user base and processing needs can grow rapidly and it is not always clear how a SaaS provider should optimally scale their service. This thesis summarizes the technological (both software and hardware) related solutions to scaling, but will also cover financial and managerial aspects of scalability. Unfortunately, there is no existing out of the box solution for managing scalability, every situation and application is currently viewed as a unique problem, but there exists a lot of good advice from many sources about scaling. Obviously there are practical solutions to scaling, as there are successful SaaS providers, but it is not clear if there exists some fundamental principles that every SaaS provider could use to address the issue of scalability. This thesis seeks to find such fundamental principles though previous research, articles and finally a case analysis of Quinyx FlexForce AB. The thesis concludes that there are many principles of scaling a 3-tier web system and that most principles can be applied by SaaS providers. / Software as a Service (SaaS) har blivit en allt vanligare lösning för företag. Detta har dock lett till skalbarhets problem för många leverantörer av SaaS. En SaaS leverantör kan få problem med skalning ifall deras användarbas eller beräkningsbehov växer för snabbt. Denna avhandling sammanfattar de tekniska (mjukvara och hårdvara) relaterade lösningar på skalning. Avhandlingen kommer även kortfattat att omfatta ekonomiska och administrativa aspekter av skalbarhet. Tyvärr finns det inga befintliga universallösningar för hantering skalbarhet utan varje situation och tillämpning måste ses som ett unikt problem. Det finns många goda råd från många källor om skalning och uppenbarligen finns det praktiska lösningar på att skala, då det finns framgångsrika SaaS leverantörer. Det är dock oklart om det finns några grundläggande principer som varje SaaS-leverantör kan använda för att underlätta skalbarhet. Avhandlingen syftar till att hitta sådana grundläggande principer och grundar sig på tidigare forskning, aktuella artiklar och avslutats med en analys av Quinyx FlexForce AB. Avhandlingen drar slutsatsen att det finns grundläggande principer som SaaS leverantörer kan tillämpa vid skalning av ett ”3-tier” webserver system.

Arbete inom molnbaserade system har vuxit i en hög grad över de senaste 20 åren. Det som har gjort molntjänster till särskild aktuella för dagens organisationer är deras kontinuerliga tillgänglighet som gör det möjligt för tjänsten att vara i gång 24 timmar om dygnet, att kunderna kan få snabbare och smidigare support kring tjänsten samt att leverantören av tjänsten sparar pengar på att inte ha servers i sina lokaler där kundernas data lagras. På grund av den stora ökningen av molnbaserade system och att allt fler organisationer väljer att migrera till molnet har flera säkerhetsrisker uppstått. De risker kan leda till skada på organisationens system, deras dagliga arbete och deras kunders säkerhet. Syftet med detta arbete är att skapa kunskap och utbilda kring de vanligaste säkerhetsrisker inom molntjänster och ta upp en rad olika försvarsmekanismer som organisationer kan implementera i sitt system för att skydda sig mot dessa. Genom en litteraturstudie och två gruppintervjuer med totalt fem respondenter som har flerårig erfarenhet av arbetet inom molntjänster har resultat tagits fram som kan vara av stöd för organisationer baserade i Sverige som arbetar med SaaS servicemodellen att veta mer om säkerhetsrisker som framkommer idag, samt hur de kan skydda sig mot dessa risker. Genom respondenternas praktiska och teoretiska kunskap inom molntjänster har slutsatser kring vilka säkerhetsrisker som kan orsaka störst skada inom molntjänster och vilka försvarsmekanismer bör implementeras inom organisationen. De säkerhetsrisker i denna studie som anses vara skadligast av respondenterna är SQL injection attack och malicious insider, medan några av försvarsmekanismer placerade av respondenterna som fungerande på flest säkerhetsrisker är Cloud based Web Firewall (CWAF) och tvåfaktorsautentisering. Begränsningar som kan påverka utfallet av det empiriska arbetet är att respondenter från båda intervjugrupper arbetar inom SaaS-bolag och att intervjutiden som erbjöds för båda grupper var en timme per grupp. För att fortsätta utveckla kunskapen som skapas i detta arbete bör man utföra framtida studier med anställda i de andra två servicemodeller (PaaS och IaaS) för att kunna få en bättre förståelse av hur de olika säkerhetsrisker påverkar organisationer inom alla servicemodeller.

Because cloud computing adoption grows day-by-day, it is essential for theexecutives of a company to be able to rely on a risks management guidanceto fully grasp all the aspects concerning cloud computing security.The concerns of the industry, the security standards, the official guidelines,and the European laws about the security when using cloud serviceshave been analyzed. The risks, the measures, and the obligations have beengathered. This paper, with all these information collected, describes how torun a risk management for public SaaS security keeping a business-drivenmindset. While running the risk assessment, the management should look atthe impact a threat may have on company activities, image, and finances. Itwill decide on the measures that should be implemented by the administrationor the IT.Following this guidance should minimize the risk of using public SaaScloud computing and allowing a company to align its security goals with itsbusiness goals.

The thesis provides legal insight of the Cloud computing with a particular focus on a specific cloud service called software as a service (SaaS). There are discussed all cloud services and distribution models of the cloud infrastructure as well as its legal aspects. The thesis analyses legal requirements of contractual provisions for a provision of the SaaS services. The substantial part deals also with types of licenses, which can be used in relation to the provision of the SaaS services. The practical part of the thesis firstly contains above all the legal framework of data protection and its legal requirements on contractual relation between provider and customer of the cloud Services. Secondly the abovementioned part provides a comparison between contractual provisions related to the processing and protection of data between two contracts, Google Apps for Work and Microsoft Office 365. Keywords Cloud computing, cloud, software as a service (SaaS), data protection, contract