Benefits are Scalability, Price, Management, Storage, and “As a Service.” When you read that last sentence, what do you think about? For us, those five words/phrases: Scalability, Price, Management, Storage and As A Service all bring the Cloud to mind. More specifically, those five words/phrases bring the benefits of Cloud hosting to mind.
Now, here is the thing, we could take this time to talk about the virtues and benefits of Cloud computing utilizing the first four words in our title: Scalability, Price, Management and Storage. We could do that.
We could tell you the benefit of Cloud hosting is an elastic environment capable of scaling to meet your growing/shrinking needs.
We could tell you the single best benefit of Cloud hosting is price. For a reasonable price per month, your company gets all the benefits of a high powered IT network without having to deal with any of the technical issues.
We could tell you that the benefits of Cloud computing for business are having a managed service provider supply you with management for your corporate Cloud environment.
We could tell you one of the major benefits of Cloud based computing are applications like Dropbox, Sugar Sync and Box.net. All Cloud storage applications designed for highly flexible storage capacities at a low monthly cost.
We could tell you all this and frankly, all this would be/is true. The benefits of Cloud hosting are found in scalability, price, management and storage. However, in our growing estimation, the single major benefit of Cloud hosting moving forward will be found in the “As a Service” movement.
The Benefits of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS Cloud Computing
For the vast majority of companies and private consumers, the question of “what is the major benefit of Cloud hosting?” should be changed to, “What are the benefits of SaaS Cloud Computing?” We say this because for an overwhelming amount of consumers and corporations, the vast majority of their Cloud hosting interactions will come in the form of SaaS or Software as a Service, is the most public facing and easiest to utilize aspect of a Cloud deployment. As it sounds, SaaS provides applications, programs and software to consumers without the consumers having to A) buy the application at full price and B) continually buy new versions of the application.
For the majority of consumers and businesses the ability to utilize applications like Adobe’s Creative Suite or Microsoft Office without having to buy the program as a per seat investment every three – four years is a financial god send. Add to this the lack of application management involved in the SaaS based market and you begin to see why the benefits of SaaS Cloud computing are so numerous.
On the same level of SaaS Cloud computing is PaaS Cloud Computing. PaaS, or Platform as a Service, allows programmers, coders and developers to build programs, applications, software and solutions via access to the Cloud platform holding the tools. Whereas SaaS allows consumers and companies to utilize applications and programs stored in the Cloud, PaaS allows developers, programmers and coders to build programs and applications via the Cloud. SaaS provides the application. PaaS provides the tools to build the application.
Lastly, we have IaaS. IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service is the model of Cloud computing which provides the groundwork for Cloud based solutions. This is to say, the benefits of IaaS are found in providing the hardware, gear and networking equipment is takes to deploy a Cloud. It might seem obvious, but IaaS is the ground level of the Cloud, PaaS is built on top of IaaS and SaaS is operated on top of both IaaS and PaaS.
So, what are the benefits of Cloud computing? Scalability, price, management and storage are all in there but the true benefits of the Cloud are found in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.