There is a high chance that if you end up asking “What is Cloud Computing?” to ten different people, you will end up getting ten different answers. This might turn out to be quite confusing for beginners who are trying to learn more about the technology. But the entire blame cannot be pinned on the people but to flexible nature of the technology itself.
It is in the best interests of everyone to think of cloud computing in three different models – SaaS Hosting (Software as a service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (Platform as a service). Let us a have a high level idea about the three service models in this article.
Software as a Service (SaaS)– The use of softwares which are hosted on the internet is used by many organizations quite often to perform several internal procedures. In simple words, SaaS allows you to access softwares which are hosted in the cloud through the internet. Hence, for you to have access to the same you just require an internet connection without having to download any software or plugin to your local.
How does this help an organization?
For instance, an organization which does not have any internal IT team to develop or overlook softwares such as CRM or some project management tool, they can avail the service for a fixed monthly rental. Without having to be bothered about the maintenance and security of the business applications, the sales team can avail the CRM through the internet and the organization has to bear a fixed rental every month.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) – The definition of PaaS is often found to be different for various service providers. In short, PaaS is a kind of cloud computing service wherein a computing platform is provided along with a solution stack. Hence, it offers the option to develop and test a software/application without having to spend on the underlying hardware and testing environment.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)– It is widely considered to be the most flexible of all cloud computing services wherein all resources, be it RAM or storage, should be completely scalable on demand. This enables or encourages organizations to develop applications which can be scaled up on demand as per requirements. The responsibility of maintaining the availability of scaling options solely lies with the service provider and in case of any hardware or network failure, there should be a high availability solution in place for users to have scalability options even during such a situation.
These were some basic definitions on these terms and some examples of how they can be utilized. The common factor between all of them is that they are all scalable, on-demand, cost effective and secure. They are completely managed so that the end user can focus on their business rather than maintaining their software, applications or hardware.