IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, MaaS, CaaS & XaaS

Hence no surprise that when the seemingly simple concept of Cloud Computing took off, so did the emergence of an abundance of acronyms and synonyms reaping a new breed of I.T. professionals who were the only ones that could correctly understand them, i.e., 'The Cloud Specialist'.  In spite of this, the beauty of the Cloud is that it not only encompasses the IT industry and their business demands however also the average end user who's only experience with IT is their iPhone and its App Store. So during EMC's extensive airport advertising may have at first confused a lot of tourists into thinking that the 'Journey to the Cloud' was a slogan for an up and coming budget airline, the general public are truly now becoming aware of 'The Cloud'. End users are now bombarded with Clouds from Microsoft claiming that Windows 7 is your 'Path to the Cloud', Pizza Restaurants offering free access to 'the Cloud' and Apple iPhone owners having iCloud enforced upon them.  So during the idea of Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds become more familiar and understood even amongst the masses, it's with surprise that I often find people within the IT industry who are however unaware or unsure of Cloud Service acronyms just as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Maas, Caas or Xaas.

To understand why there are so many acronyms with the Cloud, it is important to appreciate that the Cloud has a number of services which each of these classify. The first of these, IaaS is when the consumer does not deal with the infrastructure, instead the responsibility of the equipment is outsourced to the Service Provider. The Service Provider not only owns the equipment nevertheless will as well be responsible for its running and maintenance, where the consumer will be charged on a 'pay as you use' basis. IaaS is often offered as a horizontally integrated service that includes not only the server and storage yet also the connectivity domains. For example during the consumer may deploy and run their own applications and operating systems, the Iaas provider would typically provide the replication, backup and archiving, the powerful computing requirements or the network load balancing and firewalls.

PaaS provides the capability for consumers to have applications deployed without the burden and cost of buying and managing the hardware and software.  That is these are either consumer created or acquired web applications or services that are utterly accessible from the Internet. As a general rule created with programming languages and tools supported by the service provider these web applications enable the consumer to have control over the deployed applications and in some circumstances the application-hosting environment however without the complexity of the infrastructure i.e. the servers, operating systems or storage. Offering a quick time to market and services that can be provisioned as an integrated solution over the web, PaaS facilitates immediate business requirements just as application design, development and testing at a fraction of the normal cost.

Software as a service is the ability for a consumer to use on demand software in other words provided by the service provider via a thin client device e.g. a web browser over the Internet. With SaaS the consumer has not only no management or control of the infrastructure just as the storage, servers, network, or operating systems, nevertheless also no control over the application's capabilities. Culled from what were originally referred to as Application Service Providers, SaaS is a quick and efficient delivery model for key business applications just as customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, HR and payroll.

Monitoring as a Service is at present on the whole an emerging piece of the Cloud jigsaw nevertheless an integral one for the future. In the same way that businesses realised that their infrastructure and key applications required monitoring tools that would ensure the proactive elimination of any downtime risks, Monitoring as a Service provides the option to offload a large majority of those costs by having it run as a service as opposed to a fully invested in house tool. So for instance by logging onto a thin client or central web based dashboard which is hosted by the service provider, the consumer can monitor the status of their key applications regardless of location. Add the advantages of an easy set up and purchasing process and MaaS could be a key pay as you use model for the de-risking of applications that are at first being migrated to the Cloud.

Communication as a Service, enables the consumer to utilize Enterprise level VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), VPNs, PBX and Unified Communications without the costly investment of purchasing, hosting and managing the infrastructure. With the service provider responsible for the management and running of these services as well, the other advantage the consumer has is that they needn't require their own trained personnel, bringing significant OPEX as so then as CAPEX costs.

Finally XaaS or 'anything as a service' is the delivery of IT as a Service through hybrid Cloud computing and is a reference to either one or a combination of Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service Communications as a service or monitoring as a service. XaaS is quickly emerging as a term in other words being willingly recognized as services that were earlier separated on either private or public Clouds are becoming transparent and integrated.