In the recent times, cloud computing has been a hot topic of discussion. It has achieved such success that it has changed over from being a good choice for several businesses to becoming a necessity in several cases. However, even now there are several doubts about the real meaning of cloud computing and its impact on the way a business is run.
Cloud computing is mostly classified into three classes –
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS),
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
The first two are rated as success stories, while the final is still work-in-progress. Until now, there have been some niche successes, but still there’s no success in most cases of PaaS.
Software-as-a-Service
This is the oldest and most successful out of all the 3 classes. The greatest examples of SaaS include Workday and SalesForce, which have several millions of users. Few other successful examples are ServiceNow, Netsuite, Wageworks, and Concur. Few other general offerings like Google Apps and Office 365 can also be included in this category itself.
In these multi-tenant applications, just one instance is used by several different organizations, which can configure the program and often exploit add-ins (through APIs), though the firm that develops the program can upgrade it regularly. As a result, there’s no question of wholesale customization here.
SaaS is undoubtedly the best option for horizontal applications like human resources, salesforce management, payroll, billing, and customer support, which is needed by most firms but are not the key business differentiators.
Introduced by Amazon Web Services (AWS), IaaS is a pretty successful hosting model for several successful new ventures within existing companies or startups.
This lets developers to scale back and scale up their infrastructure requirements depending upon demand. This segment is still rapidly developing, with the 3 great providers – Google, Amazon, and Microsoft providing highly competitive pricing and more services each month. It’s been great to see the changes happening here over the last year.
So far, IaaS has been appealing to startup and smaller companies, though few of these companies have grown big. Many of the conventional enterprise vendors are now contending with their own IaaS offerings, specifically HP and IBM. It’s supposed that they will be more attractive to firms that prefer either very specialized or localized services as a hybrid cloud part using technologies like OpenStack.
The basic concept is that the provider maintains the fundamental operating system and services, while the individual developers hold the responsible of the applications running over it. This is the cloud environment’s newest aspect and something that has plenty of potential and several clear winners.
The definition for PaaS is a little unclear – few of them use the phrase to mean providing the whole development stack from operating systems and hyper-visors to complete development environments; on the other hand, others use it to refer to a particular solution like integration as a service or database.
Several research firms opine that PaaS is obtaining a good amount of adoption by corporate, but still no big company has completely adopted this solution. However, the concept seems to still be appealing to plenty of folks, and PaaS certainly has a bright future ahead.