Based upon the services offered, clouds are classified in the following ways:
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS):
Involves offering hardware related services using the
principles of cloud computing. These could include some kind of storage
services (database or disk storage) or virtual servers. Leading vendors that
provide Infrastructure as a service are
- Platform as a Service (PaaS):
Involves offering a development platform on the cloud.
Platforms provided by different vendors are typically not compatible. Typical
players in PaaS are
- Software as a service (SaaS):
Includes a complete software offering on the cloud. Users
can access a software application hosted by the cloud vendor on pay-per-use
basis. This is a well-established sector. The pioneer in this field has been
Salesforce.com offering in the online Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
space.
Ex: Salesforce CRM, Google’s Gmail, Google docs, Microsoft’s Hot
mail and Microsoft’s online version of office called BPOS (Business
Productivity Online Standard Suite)