Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the most common cloud computing service (1). This
service puts the least amount of Information Technology (IT) burden on the customer
and typically has the highest usage billing from your service provider. Next,
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), provides Infrastructure and additional tooling to allow
consumers of the service to build software without the burden of building services,
networks, databases, and other technologies needed to not only do software
development but use the final software that is deployed after development. Finally,
we get to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) which is the service I chose for this
week’s discussion. IaaS is defined in the same CIO Insight article (1) as, a form of
cloud computing that provides virtualized computing resources to consumers over
the internet on a pay-as-you-go and on-demand basis. These virtualized resources
include essential computing, storage, and networking resources.
Why would you choose IaaS? One situation could be you have an aging on-
premises hardware platform that you do not want to upgrade or maintain and are
comfortable with paying someone else to do that for you off-premises. This would
reduce your IT staff burden and free them up for other tasks. Your IT personnel
