Cloud Recovery

When the term cloud computing first generated a buzz it was typically referring to utilizing software as a service or otherwise known in the industry as (SaaS). Google is probably most known software as a service but then others in the social media industry rapidly shot up like Facebook, Twitter and My Space as well as other hosted applications that were more business critical. Although SaaS was one of the first technical adoptions of the cloud in the last few years, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) have also become viable solutions and maybe more beneficial to companies than just software.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Other than the search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo what can these (SaaS) models do to help a company. The Social Media applications are quickly replacing traditional marketing like print advertising so this is one area but there are many other SaaS available that can help improve efficiency and productivity. Anything from website hosting, content management and or just a dependable database for backend infrastructure are all available for a quick deployment.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a Service is more popular and mostly utilized by the developer community and was likely started with the introduction and popularity of Linux open source code. This cloud computing model provides a platform for developers to code, test and experiment new software without the complexity of setting up and maintaining test, development and production servers.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a service is probably where many large companies like HP, IBM, Amazon and Rackspace are focusing their attention. This service model provides both companies as well as consumers the ability to utilize already optimized and maintained virtualized resources at a data center via a web service or VPN connection. Many will use this to backup, recover data files and or full servers in the event of a loss and that resource needs to be recovered. It can also serve as the primary server and actually run the application workload from this location alleviating the company IT staff of having to procure and or maintain the server infrastructure and or application expertise to provide that service. This is typically billed on a per use basis so only the resources, processing and or storage used is billed at the end of each month.

These are the big three but is there a forth that is already in progress. It is already being adopted by some companies as well as being discussed and that is Recovery as a Service (RaaS). Stay tuned for the next blog post Cloud 101 – Recovery as a Service: How it works