Theses terms are very often intermixed while marketing these products, but they do mean different things:Cloud LIMS is any LIMS system hosted in ‘the cloud’, i.e. not on-premise. Even IT systems internal to a Company may be Cloud based these days. Renting space in external data centers, or co-location facility, could be termed ‘cloud. There are many Companies offering cloud IT infrastructure, AWS and Azure amongst them. The benefits are a fast roll-out of services, fast expansion if needed, and low up-front costs.Hosted LIMS is where a provider manages (hosts) the LIMS infrastructure and LIMS application for you, in a secure data centre. You won’t need to worry about buying the hardware, loading and updating operating systems, installing and maintaining application software, all this is done for you. Within the LIMS world ‘hosted LIMS’ usually means you will have your own application server and database server and you will control of when security patches and software updates are performed.SaaS LIMS differs from Hosted LIMS, in the LIMS world, as you may share the LIMS software, the application server, the database software, the database server in any combination. Sharing resources like this drives down costs to a minimum, so a provider will run a single application on a single server and a single database application and a single database application server, to keep costs to a minimum. But modern techniques can still keep your data isolated and secure. The issue with SaaS is that you will have applications and services patched and upgraded in a timeline that suits the service provider and will affect everyone. Also only limited configuration of screens may be allowed, limiting how much you can optimize a standard workflow to your specific needs.Remember, every lab is different and very often require configuration changes to match your processes and maximize efficiency – that’s why Autoscribe recommends the Hosted LIMS solution, providing you maximum flexibility, with all the benefits of cloud, and without the limitations of SaaS.