Getting to grips with Cloud lingo

By Sudaraka Jayashanka

When you wake up in the morning, do you check your emails, or Facebook? Do you ask “Alexa, how is the traffic today?” whilst simultaneously checking the weather forecast? I bet the answer is yes, which means you live and breathe the Cloud. 

Accept it people, it’s a done-deal. We’re in the Cloud and there is no single day in our life that we don’t interact with it. While a layman doesn’t understand what is going on behind the scenes when they ‘like’ something on Facebook or swipe right on Tinder, there could be thousands of events taking place in the Cloud making these actions happen, and allowing companies to provide their various services. 

Companies are spending millions of dollars interacting with their customers by using the Cloud. If your company is about to take this step you’ll find it useful to understand the technical terms and lingo that your IT team will engage you in. As the CTO of a global Cloud-to-Cloud systems integration and product/platform incubation company – Mitra Innovation (mitrai.com) – I thought I’d help.

Understand 

the lingo

With the advances in Cloud a variation of Cloud-based services has emerged that can be grouped under separate headings – PaaS, SaaS and IaaS. So, what are these services?

PaaS

PaaS is the abbreviation for Platform as a Service. This essentially means the provision of a ‘platform’ or Cloud-based environment from which businesses and individuals can create, build, host, run and manage applications over the Internet without the need for expensive infrastructures.

The platforms typically include the following: a database; a web server; an operating system; a programming language; and an executing environment. 

Examples of PaaS include Microsoft Azure, Engine Yard, Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the Google App Engine. Typical PaaS environments which we use at Mitra Innovation on behalf of our clients include Azure and AWS. We have used these platforms to incubate new products such as Modern Democracy, Guardian MPS, Ramsey Hospitals and FoodAssured.com.

SaaS

Internet based applications are the humble beginnings of Software as a Service, aka SaaS. From the word processor to software development tools, to online movies provided by Netflix or Amazon, all these simple to complex applications have now made their way onto the Cloud, which offers a much greater breadth of functionality than the Internet. 

The Cloud enables customers to draw down these services as they need them, on a pay-as-you-go subscription basis, as opposed to paying for costly fixed-term licences which is what previously happened. 

Not only has this reduced a massive amount of capex for large enterprises with multiple users, but it has also enabled smaller businesses to use sophisticated software they could never afford before. For example, there was a time that the Microsoft Office Personal Package cost over $1000 to purchase, whereas today, on the Cloud it costs as little as $8 a month. 

SaaS also enables companies to save money when it comes to installation, maintenance and software upgrades. Previously this would have been managed in-house for each piece of software. But not anymore. This is all managed by the SaaS provider.

Another benefit of SaaS is that consumption can also be scaled up and down as a business demands.

SaaS can also be known as ‘on-demand software’, ‘hosted software’ or ‘web-based-software’.

Examples of SaaS include Salesforce.com (who were pioneers in this space), Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, Dropbox, and Slack.

At Mitra Innovation most of the products and platforms built are SaaS solutions. 

IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service is the long-hand version of IaaS and it has completely changed the spectrum of managed services as we know it. Traditional IT departments are now closing their doors and removing racks full of IT equipment from their place of work. 

Specialised engineers with skills are now managing the day-to-day IT operations instead, including network management, database backups, and the many more trivial and non-trivial IT related tasks that are now run in the Cloud. This means that companies can focus on running their businesses, instead of worrying about infrastructure burdens. 

In today’s world, an organisation can simply log into a Cloud account and create a virtual private network where its IT users can spin a database with automated maintenance. Before the Cloud, this kind of task used to take days to complete.

A paradigm shift

The Cloud and Cloud-based services have changed the world as we know it. They have introduced a paradigm shift in how we run businesses today. If you haven’t already, it’s time to jump on-board.

(The writer is CTO, Mitra Innovation.)