The cloud, and particularly the SaaS delivery model, is responsible for the rise of shadow IT in business. In the SaaS model, the software vendor is responsible for hosting and maintaining the application, which users access via a network. For corporate IT departments, choosing SaaS over traditional licensed software offers a number of benefits. Since the application vendor hosts the software, the enterprise IT department can avoid capital investments in infrastructure. In addition, the vendor is responsible for operational tasks, including infrastructure maintenance, testing, provisioning, upgrades and refreshes, capacity planning, and performance management. Backup and recovery for data and infrastructure is also largely the responsibility of the vendor in a SaaS environment.