Salesforce.com's recent announcement of its VMforce platform for deploying Java applications is the latest in a long line of announcements from a wide range of vendors of such on-demand (or cloud based if you prefer) offerings. Many will be confused by the range of offerings and the terminology used to describe them and will be unsure of the risk and benefits.
Essentially there are three levels of on-demand offerings. These mirror the way IT is increasingly deployed internally.
The lowest level is infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). This is where pre-configured hardware is provided via a virtualised interface or hypervisor. There is no high level infrastructure software provided such as an operating system, this must be provided by the buyer embedded with their own virtual applications.
IaaS is particularly useful for organisations that are running virtualised applications internally, but may want to make use of additional capacity when their own resources are stretched. On demand storage is applications are also considered as IaaS.
Platform as a service (PaaS) goes a stage further and includes the operating environment, including the operating system and application services. PaaS suits organisations that are committed to a given development environment for a given application but like the idea of someone else maintaining the deployment platform for them.
SaaS goes the whole hog, offering fully functional applications on-demand applications to provide specific services such as email management, CRM, ERP, web conferencing and an increasingly wide range of other applications.
Many independent software vendors (ISVs) are now turning the SaaS model and making on-demand applications as versions of their applications available. To do so they are often using IaaS or PaaS for deployment.
Much of the coverage of on-demand offerings focuses on a few high profile vendors and it is easy to think the market is restricted to them. This is simply not true; many managed hosting providers are now providing IaaS and/or PaaS as an alternative to their traditional dedicated infrastructure hosting services. Add to this the number of ISVs now offering full or partial SaaS and the aggregated market these organisations represent is easily as big as that of their higher profile counterparts.
Choosing a supplier will depend on the type of platform required, the SLA on offer and the guarantees that can be offered around security and governance.
Perhaps the most high profile IaaS platform is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Other examples are Attenda's RTI and Rackspace's Cloud Servers (currently in beta and being fully launched in the next few months).
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