You need to make many decisions when you decide to move to cloud, starting with the question of what kind of cloud you want to use. KPMG predicts Platform as a Service (PaaS) will be the fastest growing cloud sector, but is PaaS what you need in your business?
Three Kinds of Cloud
Before you decide, take a moment to remember what the three types of cloud give you.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) gives you infrastructure where you pay for your storage and computing resources as they are needed and used. Platform as a Service layers development tools on top of that, giving you a complete, supported environment for delivering applications. Software as a Service delivers applications on a subscription basis, where you have no ownership, management, or insight into the underlying hardware.
Benefits and Tradeoffs
Each cloud model has advantages and disadvantages. All three models alleviate some of your internal IT team’s support responsibilities, and all three models give you more agility and flexibility than if you were maintaining the infrastructure and applications on premises. All the models offer the potential to reduce costs, transforming major outlays into smaller, ongoing payments. At the same time, all the cloud models take away a certain amount of flexibility. Each model has its own specific pluses and minuses as well:
- IaaS offers you the most control over your environment, but you also retain the most responsibility. Your team will need to manage the operating system and all the applications you deploy. You can choose to implement IaaS as a private cloud within your own data center. IaaS may be a good choice if your primary goal for moving to cloud is to reduce your team’s time spent on infrastructure support.
- PaaS ensures that you have a robust development and deployment environment. But it ties you to the specific cloud provider’s implementation of that environment. This can lead to vendor lock-in and make it difficult for you to migrate to another cloud provider even if that would be advantageous. With some effort, you can provide PaaS on a private cloud within your own data center. PaaS may be a good choice if your goal in using cloud is to implement a DevOps process and increase the agility of your software development process. PaaS is also a good choice when you want to experiment with new development technology without making a major investment.
- SaaS means your data resides on the vendor’s hardware. You may have limited access to the data and be unable to use it for other purposes; you may not be able to schedule or control application upgrades, potentially leading to the loss of functionality you need. SaaS is a good choice if you want to eliminate time spent installing and upgrading third party applications.
The Infrastructure as a Service solution from dcVAST offers a robust cloud environment that supports public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud configurations. Support from dcVAST ensures high levels of availability. Contact the dcVAST team to learn more about IaaS and discuss the appropriate cloud solution to support your business and technology objectives.
