Question

What type of services are good candidates for cloud computing in your organization (or university); Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS)? Would you recommend that your organization move to the cloud (i.e., use some cloud computing services)? Why or why not?

Answer 1

The type of services that are good candidates for cloud computing in my organization is all three- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS). My organization uses IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions, services, products, and applications in the cloud. My organization is into providing software services developing software and applications to their customer and client companies. Hence, my organization has all three business requirements to use IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in the cloud. My organization has its entire Information Technology (IT) infrastructure in the cloud, specifically in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public Cloud Service Provider (CSP).

However, other organizations might have different business requirements, uses cases, situations, scenarios, issues, and problems for which they may have to mix and match all three IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, using a combination of these three. Some and each of the other companies, clients, customers, universities, governments, health sector, non-profit organizations might use either only IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, or a combination of any two.

For example, how my organization benefits from using all three- IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS is:
* IaaS: It provides computer infrastructure to my company as a service offering computing capabilities such as servers or physical machines, Virtual Machines (VMs), Operating System (OS)-level virtualization, and basic storage such as object and block storages, and network as standardized services over the network such as the public Internet. The CSP provides servers, storage systems, switches, routers, and other systems that are purchased by my organization and are reserved for use. IaaS makes it affordable, easy, convenient, flexible, and quick in provisioning resources such as servers, connections, storage, and many other related tools that are necessary for building an application environment from ground-up and on-demand. It provides a platform virtualization environment. An example: AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services.

* PaaS: This offers services; solution stacks such as Java, PHP, .NET; and storage such as databases and file storage. PaaS provides a virtualized platform comprising one or more servers that would be virtualized ultimately over the set of physical servers, OSs, and specific applications such as MySQL and Apache for Web-based applications. PaaS also gives us an option to provide the platform with a VM image containing all the required user-specific applications. There is no need to install any specific services, solution stacks, or databases on the users' machines. An example would be AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

* SaaS: It offers us access to different software over the Internet as a service, on-demand. A single instance of a software runs on our CSP cloud and provides services to multiple end-users and client organizations. Examples of some of the SaaS we use with different CSPs are Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps for work accounts or G-Suite, G-mail, Cisco WebEx, ZenDesk, GoToMeeting, etc. These applications and software are accessed through a standard Web browser software.

If I recommend that my organization move to the cloud (i.e., use some cloud computing services):
Yes, I definitely and 100% recommend that my organization move to the cloud i.e., use some cloud computing services, in case, my organization or any other organization or universities are not using and leveraging cloud computing technology and CSP. I recommend AWS CSP. They could use most of AWS provided and offered services, solutions, products, appliances, features, and options, and also use other applications developed by other vendors marketed and sold in the AWS marketplace- a platform for developers of applications and software to sell them and customer companies to buy and use them in the AWS cloud on a subscription basis.

Why I recommend that my organization moves to the cloud (i.e., use some cloud computing services):
Cloud computing technology and the CSPs provide and offer a lot of benefits and advantages such as strongest security, reliability, high scalability, High Availability, (HA), elasticity, cost-effectiveness, on-demand services, convenience, comfortability, flexibility, backup and restore, Disaster Recovery (DR), fault tolerance, load balancing, pay-as-you-go pricing model, business continuity, reduced IT costs, efficiency, robustness, collaboration efficiency, increased collaboration, access to automatic updates, work practices flexibility, marketing globally in minutes, low latency, loss prevention, mobility, control, competitive edge, 24 X 7 availability, customer and technical support, less or no capital expenditure, easy and simple implementation, quickness, off-site data storage, streamline work-flow, environment-friendly, software integration, rapid development, etc.