Making sense of the complex “as a Service” ecosystem

By Max Coburn, Margaret Dawson

“The benefits of doing things “as-a-Service” (aaS) and leveraging cloud-based technologies are well-known and documented, such as a low barrier to entry, reduced capital outlay and infrastructure, easy scalability, and device/location independence. Many companies also appreciate the reliability of service and the ability to leverage specialized domain knowledge expertise from an experienced aaS provider.

However, there is still a great deal of confusion about the many different types of aaS and questions remain over how much companies should rely on the cloud. Specifically, when is the right time to turn to aaS rather than build and manage in-house and what are some of the pitfalls that can be avoided when moving to an aaS-based solution?

Leveraging the cloud and delivered as a service, each aaS has the ability to help you do things faster, better, cheaper. The most attractive characteristic of the aaS movement is a flexibility that allows for an incremental or selective approach to deployments. You don’t need to do it all at once, and you can mix and match.

The following is a brief synopsis of current aaS variants, when you should consider them, and what the future might hold for this technology.

First, here’s a quick cheat sheet of three most common aaSes:

1. IaaS – stands for both Integration-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service
2. SaaS – Software-as-a-Service
3. PaaS – Platform-as-a-Service

Integration-as-a-Service (IaaS) is probably the oldest, and has historically been the most stagnant, of the aaSes. IaaS originally functioned as a connector, providing integration for businesses to transmit documents to each other, such as EDI (electronic data interchange) and VANs (value added networks). Examples of this type of business document interchange go back to as early as the 1960s and really took hold during the ’70s and ’80s when early service providers helped companies automate this exchange. IaaS improved substantially once documents could be sent digitally over the Internet.”

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