Riders in the Cloud

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

  Business Intelligence   Integration Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Strategy  

In the first segment of this month’s IT Strategist on Cloud Computing, three categories or models were identified as follows:

Software as a Service (SaaS) – Per Wikipedia SaaS is “software that is deployed over the internet and/or is deployed to run behind a firewall on a local area network or personal computer”.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) – Again, per Wikipedia, PaaS “is the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. PaaS offerings facilitate deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet.

Integration as a Service (IaaS) –Per Wikipedia IaaS is, “typically a platform virtualization environment - as a service. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data-center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. Suppliers typically bill such services on a utility computing basis and amount of resources consumed (and therefore the cost) will typically reflect the level of activity”.

This installment on Cloud Computing will take a look at who some of the up-and-…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.