There are many cloud services to choose from, such as Salesforce, Quicken, or Workday. Enterprise-level cloud providers include AWS, Azure, IBM, or Google. With a plethora of household names, sometimes their offerings can be overwhelming. When choosing which one to go with, for small and medium businesses, cloud offerings can fall into three fundamental cloud categories.
Software as a Service (SaaS) — The most popular style of cloud service, SaaS solutions offer cloud-based applications for companies that are accessible via a web or mobile app. Slack, Salesforce, and Workday are all examples of this type of service. The main benefit is that the app is always current, there are no updates required. Secondly, integrations are popular, and often at the click of a button if integrating with other well-known products, which allows companies to leverage their data in many applications. Overall, employing SaaS typically grants companies huge cost savings, reduces IT overhead, and normally offloads much of the IT administrative tasks to the cloud service.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) — PaaS solutions are for development engineers who use virtual cloud environments to develop and test their own custom apps. This is an exceptional benefit for developers who no longer need to maintain their programming environments, including the infrastructure supporting them such as network, compute, and storage devices. PaaS solutions are typically used by larger organizations that rely on developing their own custom applications. However, low-code and no-code PaaS solutions are putting simple to complex development in the hands of non-programmers who can critically think about business processes, and now develop apps around those processes.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) — IaaS solutions are virtual machines that give users access to all the resources of that environment, such as compute and storage, so they can install and run their preferred OS and applications. These are virtual machines that run on top of the hypervisor. Contrastingly, a bare metal cloud gives users access to the machines underneath. These machines are dedicated, and the user does not share them with other tenants.