In this posting, I summarize my prior three posts on the three cloud computing offerings: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
I concentrate how the three offerings differ with respect to flexibility, maintenance and portability. One of the greatest challenges companies face when moving to the cloud is security. Thus I will devote an entire blog post in the future, to security concerns.
Flexibility
- How much flexibility do you have with each offering?
- What can you change or modify within each cloud offering to suit your needs?
- Can you modify the software, the look-and-feel, the branding, the hardware even the source code with each cloud offering?
Maintenance
- How much do you need to maintain with each cloud offering?
- Do you need to hire programmers, data analysts, system administrators or just application users to use each cloud offering?
- Can you modify the software, the look-and-feel, the branding, the hardware even the source code with each cloud offering?
Portability
- If your application is hosted at either an IaaS, PaaS or SaaS provider, what are your options if you need to transfer your application and data to another provider?
- In what format will your data be provided to you?
- How easily can you download or extract your data and in what format will it be provided to you?
