SaaS started the move toward cloud computing by demonstrating that IT services could be made available, safe, and efficient over the web. While SaaS vendors originally did not use the word "cloud" to describe their offerings, analysts now consider SaaS to be one of several subsets of the cloud-computing market. Although the cloud was pre-dated in the late 1990s by application service providers, which generally were single-purpose vendors with frail connections and subpar security, AWS is generally credited with starting the cloud era in fall 2006 with the release of its Simple Storage Service, or S3.