Most businesses today are based on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) framework. Like any other type of business, these also must be kept ready for growth. The most obvious area they need to keep in mind is the growth in their traffic. 

Even the smallest businesses must be ready for unexpected growth. This could be due to the launch of a new product or a service if the business received sudden attention from the customers due to a celebrity endorsement or any other reason. It can even be a sudden shift in the industry that creates a spike in website traffic. 

Well, the business must be ready for all these events. So if you are not ready yet, start preparing the SaaS business for growth. Your online business platform must be ready to scale at any time with the need for a buffer time. Preparing the business for expansion is more than just doing the coding work. It will also require you to make business changes. You will also require a commitment to make the desired changes in the business, including changes in the methods. 

Here are seven things that you can do to make sure that your business is ready for hyper-growth.

1. Commit to DevOps: Incorporate the capabilities of DevOps in version management, replacing it with continuous deployment and continuous improvement capabilities. With the help of these technologies, it is easy to test, deploy, and easy to roll back the software codes that are developed by the systems. DevOps will also help you to manage your web-based applications in areas of development, operations, and use.
2. Adopt A Service-Based Architecture: Apart from the application, it is important to scale the organization as well. It will be difficult for the different team members to work independently. You have to learn to manage independent teams that work on different projects and on the same applications. For this, the application needs to be built on a service-oriented architecture, such as microservices.
3. Track the growth plan: Tracking and measuring the plan’s results is an important part of any growth strategy. There are many ways to track, but the most accurate way is to use data that are relevant to your business. For example, if you’re a restaurant owner, then tracking how many orders come in per hour would be helpful information for determining when and where you should open new locations or hire more staff.

The same goes for any other type of business: If you want to know if someone should be promoted ahead of another employee because they’ve been working harder than their colleagues, then tracking their performance will give us insight into whether or not this is true (and how much effort has gone into getting there).

1. Make your business available: Your customers must be able to find you immediately. Some businesses believe that they can make themselves highly available by maintaining their application on a regular basis. This is not regarded as a good practice, and being overly dependent on system maintenance is not the best practice. You have to find the right way to upgrade your application so that it is also available to the customers all the time. One of the best examples of a service designed for high availability is Amazon S3. Here, all the maintenance is carried out without taking the application down. 
2. Identify and understand your organizational risks: All the business applications have some other risks associated with them. It is difficult to eliminate all the risks. But, it is wise to examine, measure, and monitor the risks of the applications. This will reduce the impact of the complexity and make things simple for your business expansion. Three steps are involved in the risk management scenario, determining where the risk is within your system, determining which risk items are critical, and developing a plan to mitigate the risks.
3. Use the “Just In Time” Infrastructure- Business scaling can be done very easily when all the resources are present on the public cloud. If your application is developed in the right way, it is easy to scale it really quickly so that it can handle significantly more traffic than it was doing in the past.  
4. Automate Process: All the technical processes of the business must be automated. This includes technical standpoints, application testing, as well as deployment. This also includes updating the technical infrastructure of the application. It also covers processes such as problem review, problem resolution, and the overall decision-making process. It can also be said that automation removes single-point failure that can happen in the case of manual work. 

So it is time to start preparing your SaaS business for growth. Keep all the above things in mind and get started on all the new journeys. 

Source – All business