Cloud Services

There is a lot of hype about the “Cloud” but what is cloud, what does it mean for businesses and what are the real benefits?

Business Boxed provide impartial advice of the various types of cloud computing and will be able to help you understand which is the right route for your business, cloud can offer significant advantages and cost reductions if it is done right, unfortunately if it’s done wrong it can have a significant impact upon the business and this is where Business Boxed can ensure you make the right decision.

 

Put simply cloud is where some or all of your business applications and data are hosted in a data centre. There are a number of different cloud offerings, some you may of heard of and some you won’t.

 

 

 

Cloud Options Explained

 

 

Component Cloud
Component cloud is where you host some of your applications but retain onsite server infrastructure for others. This method can offer some advantages in reduced cost of deployment, however you will need to manage multiple relationships between vendors and service providers and you may not be able to fully integrate all of your business data. There may also be several different access portals which can cause confusion and significantly reduce productivity.

 

Total Cloud
Total cloud is where all of your business applications, systems and data is hosted and managed with a single provider, typically the solution will include management of your applications, the server infrastructure required, Microsoft Licensing for Office and Exchange, online and onsite support and communication lines for a fixed per user per month fee. All of your businesses applications and data are accessed through a secure portal, this portal can be accessed anywhere via an internet browser, Tablet PC or smartphone.

 

Daas
Desktop as a service (DaaS), also called virtual desktop or hosted desktop services, is the outsourcing of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to a third party service provider.

 

DaaS has a multi-tenancy architecture and the service is purchased on a subscription basis. In the DaaS delivery model, the service provider manages the back-end responsibilities of data storage, backup, security and upgrades. Typically, the customer's personal data is copied to and from the virtual desktop during logon/logoff and access to the desktop is device, location and network independent.

 

Desktop as a service is a good alternative for a small or mid-size businesses (SMBs) that want to provide their end users with the advantages a virtual desktop infrastructure offers, but find that deploying a VDI in-house to be cost-prohibitive in terms of budget and staffing.

 

SaaS
Software as a Service (SaaS) is where you rent a single application for your business, the application is usually hosted by the vendor and accessed through your web browser. Typical SaaS applications include Hosted email such as Microsoft Exchange and CRM tools such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM.

 

IaaS
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is where you rent server, network or data storage services through a provider. There is typically no or limited support provided with the service and the infrastructure is self managed. Typically this type of deployment is useful if you have in house experienced technical teams but lack the room needed to manage your own servers in house.

 

PaaS
Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a computing platform and a solution stack as a service.  Along with software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), it is a service model of cloud computing. In this model, the consumer creates the software using tools and/or libraries from the provider. The consumer also controls software deployment and configuration settings. The provider provides the networks, servers, storage and other services.

 
PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities.

 
There are various types of PaaS vendors; however, all offer application hosting and a deployment environment, along with various integrated services. Services offer varying levels of scalability and maintenance.

 
PaaS offerings may also include facilities for application design, application development, testing and deployment as well as services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation.

 

BaaS/MBaaS
Backend as a service (BaaS), also known as "mobile backend as a service" (MBaaS), is a model for providing web and mobile app developers with a way to link their applications to backend cloud storage while also providing features such as user management, push notifications, and integration with social networking services. These services are provided via the use of custom software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). BaaS is a relatively recent development in cloud computing.

 

The cloud and mobile are the the buzzwords these days. Hardly a week goes by when we don’t hear new innovations related to these technologies. While most of these innovations are simply theories or opinions that are not backed up by solid proof, there are some innovations which are widely adopted in the industry.

 

In recent months, the data consumed by mobile phones and tablets has increased exponentially and developers need to deploy new applications as fast and as cheaply as possible. As a result this creates huge challenges in storing and managing data and this has resulted in the rise of specialized Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers.

 

The Mobile BaaS (MBaaS) is a service that is a mashup of the services of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). It includes the software modules needed to run the backend of mobile applications. The idea behind MBaaS is to reduce the amount of time which developers spend in configuring and managing the IaaS and PaaS while developing the backend for the applications.

 

 

 


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