To Cloud or Not to Cloud
SaaS
IaaS
PaaS
Whaat??
Information Technology people have always used acronyms extensively. Some tech companies even publish a glossary to let everyone know what all of their acronyms stand for. Just when you were getting used to all the "TLAs" (Three-Letter-Acronyms), some new ones emerge that are four letters long, and probably just as confusing as all the others.
As you make your decisions to move some or all of your information technology operations to the cloud, it is useful to have a working understanding of the more frequently used acronyms.
SaaS-Software as a Service
Anyone who has ever purchased something on line, or played online games has used software as a service. In the old on-premises model, companies purchased software and loaded it onto servers located in their own offices. Usually this meant that the decision to purchase any particular software application had to be made on an enterprise-wide basis. This often had the effect of prolonging the decision-making cycle and denying the company access to that application for a longer period of time.
Many business applications, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365, deliver software applications over the internet to users who generally access them using nothing more than a web browser. Office 365 includes the highly popular Microsoft Office suite including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and more. It also delivers the world's most popular email platform, Microsoft Exchange, as well as Microsoft's leading collaboration and file management system SharePoint. Finally it includes their new unified collaboration platform, Lync. All are delivered over the internet meaning that no customer investment in servers or storage is required. All each user needs is a computer running a browser.
IaaS-Infrastructure as a Service
Many software applications, especially those developed specifically for a given company or one of their lines of business, will not be available as a service. Should those companies decide that they do not want the expense or burden of managing their own computing infrastructure, they can opt to obtain it as a utility computing service from an IaaS provider. All of the servers, storage, and networking infrastructure they require for their line of business applications is then housed in the provider's data center rather than their own facilities. Most of these providers make it easy for client companies to provision more resources as they are required, or throttle them back when not in use, thus reducing their overall operating cost. This is often referred to as making this cloud computing strategy highly elastic.
PaaS-Platform as a Service
Software Application Developers often turn to PaaS services because they combine the necessary computing platform with a robust development environment and solution stack designed to ease rapid development, prototyping, testing and deployment of applications using webparts, web applications, and other utilities all available over the internet with no local server, storage, or networking necessary.
For deeper level explanations of these and other terms that may be unclear, reach out to CloudStrategies.