Contributed by Michael Ray, Solutions Architect for VAZATA.
Saas, PaaS, and IaaS
IaaS is a hosted data storage solution, in which the cloud provider offers base hardware and computing resources, such as virtual machines, servers, storage and network equipment. Operating systems and applications—which are maintained by the client—can then be laid on top of, and run through, the provider’s equipment.
One of the primary benefits of IaaS is the ability to scale resources on demand—meeting capacity growth without the needed time, cost and energy of setting up a new, physical IT environment.
Pete Benoit, VP of Technical Solutions at VAZATA, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider serving Global 1000 businesses, U.S. Federal Government Agencies and Mid-Market Enterprises has this to say on the subject:
“From my point of view, there are very straight forward reasons to choose PaaS over IaaS in certain cases. The reasoning follows the same logic as any decision to outsource or use a service provider. A company would choose to extend its relationship to this layer to gain the expertise held by the provider or lessen the internal support requirements for running the application. This could translate into cost savings and, possibly a more efficient method to run the application. I should point out that a PaaS relationship would split the application responsibilities between the top line application team and a service provider. Depending on the circumstance, this split could be beneficial, in a best case scenario, or cause inefficiencies in the deployment and maintenance of the service on the other hand. This is a potential issue that should be thoroughly considered and mapped out during the selection process.”
The race to $0 is a very interesting point and aarccute. Everything in IT eventually goes commodity, and the winners either drive to commodity (circa Dell) or recognize it and provide a portfolio of services and solutions. With cloud, capital expenditures can be large to deploy a back-end infrastructure that allows a provider to compete. Providers will either have to figure out how to provide Cloud solutions extremely effectively or deliver value added applications on top of the Cloud. The saving grace to providers at least for the next few years is that many legacy enterprise applications are so customized that migrating to SaaS applications won’t support the requirements or more complex underlying cloud infrastructure is needed, which providers can charge premium pricing for.
@Alan
I agree and that is what we are seeing. Not only will the application developers have to catch up but we are really just dealing with the basic transition discomfort of the IT staffs. By far our biggest competition for providing IaaS today is internal IT.
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