You may have heard or read about ‘Cloud Computing’ quite often in the last few years. Most often what is shared gives you a vague idea on how cloud services work, and how they tend to benefit your business. It is important to remember that Cloud Computing is not a single entity, but describes a broad range of services. It offers easy to access, on-demand network to a shared pool of users. The idea behind this solution is to make network, servers, storage and applications independent of the users and allow provisioning of these resources. With cloud computing, it is possible to share the same resources between large sections of customers thereby reducing the costs. Cloud Computing generally works under three different service models and here in this write-up we take a look at each of these.
Software As A Service (SaaS)
This is the most common application of cloud computing solutions, where the consumer uses a software running on the cloud without installing it to the local system. The greatest advantage with SaaS is that the software would be accessible to the clients for a wide range of devices and, it comes with no restrictions such as location, time hardware or operating system used by the end user. You can access the software via the web, which increases the flexibility of SaaS models. This also improves the cost-effectiveness as you pay based on your usage, and you don’t need to purchase the software. Here, customers don’t need to bother about software updates and patches as these are handled by the service providers.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
PaaS is quite similar to the SaaS model with a single difference- here the customers can access the entire platform and not just the software. This basically allows a business to build and deploy applications using the cloud instead of having to rely on traditional tools and servers. Here, a business can access programming languages, services, libraries and tools on the cloud itself and convert any of the device into a development platform. Every aspect of the platform such as storage, network, tools and operating systems would be managed by the service provider and the customer only needs to take care of the applications built and deployed using cloud.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS is regarded as the most advanced application of cloud computing where the entire infrastructure is made available to the customer. The cloud computing infrastructure that is delivered as a service includes everything from servers, storage, network and operating systems. This infrastructure is made available to the customers on demand basis and helps them reduce the cost of building and maintaining physical infrastructure. There is no need to create data centres and dedicated networks when one is using these solutions. Customers can own both private and public clouds depending on their needs.
Cloud computing allows small & medium businesses take their giant rivals head on and help large businesses reduce their costs, thus offering better access to services and information. If you are looking for cloud computing solution provider you can choose Semaphore Software. We develop & deploy tailored apps to suit your business needs. Write to us at info@semaphore-software.com to know more.
