Cloud Service Models – SaaS, PaaS and IaaS

Objectives of any business can be achieved through excellent customer service and different types of services are provided by following Cloud Service Models:

1. SaaS (Software as a Service):

A software release model, SAAS is hosted centrally in the cloud along with its allied data and can be accessible through users by means of web a browser. SaaS is also referred as “on-demand software”. For many business applications such as, accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management, business enterprise resource planning, human resource management, content management and service desk management etc, SaaS becomes a general delivery model.

Usually the term SaaS can be precisely used where most of the initial application service providers focus on managing and hosting third-party independent software vendors who are capable enough to build up and run individual software. Also by means of currently used software architecture, cloud computing service providers make a separate instance of an application mandatory for each business, so, to design an application in view of providing multiple businesses and users with corresponding partitioning of data, a multi-tenant architecture as a service solution has been utilized by existing web-based software.

2. PaaS (Platform as a Service):

Using a Cloud service model called as PAAS, applications can be used effortlessly, exclusive of any complication regarding the cost and management of the required hardware and software. As PaaS supports the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services by facilitating design, development, testing, deployment and hosting itself.
Services like team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, facilitation of developer community, application versioning and instrumentation, etc. might be provisioned as an integrated solution over the web.

All these facilities permit customization of the existing SaaS applications which is comparable to the facility of packaged software applications such as Microsoft Word. But, every time developers and users of PaaS need to subscribe SaaS applications, in view of developing a comprehensive environment, stand-alone PaaS environment has been proposed which is free from any type of technical, licensing or financial dependencies based on specific SaaS applications or web services. Still, some PaaS  applications require improvement in the development, debugging and testing capabilities to provide hosting-level services such as security and on-demand scalability etc.

In PaaS, under the concept of Open platform as a service, developers can use any programming language, database, operating system and server too.

3. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service):

To release infrastructure as a fully outsourced service, IaaS is a capital investment-sourced model. As by means of IaaS, all the resources like servers, software licenses, data center space and network equipment etc can be purchased by clients as fully outsourced service only. Hence concerning the customer’s significant project, IaaS through a dedicated hosting environment is the most stout, safe and sound policy.

Advantages of IaaS:

1. Dynamic scaling: capability of vertical scaling and horizontal scaling the various resource aspects in close to real time, according to varying business requirements.

2. Usage-based pricing: This strategy of IAAS helps customers in purchasing the precise infrastructure which may be required at any particular time by ensuring “just pay for what you use”.

3. Reduced capital and personnel costs: Reduced in-house infrastructure considerably eliminates capital expenditures and enduring cost for workforce and enables any organization to concentrate on core competencies in view of developing and filtering market product offerings more willingly than purchasing hardware accessories.

4. Access to superior IT resources: Unaffordable Enterprise-grade IT infrastructure and engineering resources become accessible to IaaS users.