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Cloud providers are everywhere these days. As a business, you probably get dozens of calls a month about getting an account with one of them. But what does it all mean to you and who should you choose? And exactly what is the Cloud?

The cloud is simply a very large server farm. It’s a campus composed of many large buildings in a row, all housing servers on racks. They take up about ¼ mile of space, but their digital reach is worldwide.

IaaS, PaaS, & SaaS

There are three main services provided by cloud providers: IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), PaaS (Platform as a service), and SaaS (Software as a service. These are replicated from on-premises experiences, and you are using them now even if you aren’t aware of it.

IaaS is a type of cloud computing service that provides essential compute, storage, and networking resources. They are comprised of servers for data storage, web servers for making web pages available to browsers, and software servers for code. IaaS is very important to businesses and can provide significant cost savings.

In an on-premises situation, your company must have a network administrator and a web and server administrator just to host a web site. If you don’t have an IT department and would rather outsource this task, the cloud is the only way to go.

Security is a huge issue in this age of cyberthreats that all too often have proved very real. According to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures, global cybercrime costs are expected to grow 15% per year over the next five years reaching $10.5 trillion dollars in losses by 2025. Hackers do not just hit large financial companies; they actually thrive on the small to medium business and government entities. It is more likely that non-profits, small towns, and counties do not have updated infrastructure or security and they are easy targets. No business is too small for a cyberthief. Solving the problem of security was a big reason why the cloud evolved.

The engineers and administrators who support these servers are trained and certified by AWS, Azure or Google and know their jobs very well. They are the experts on their platforms. Your server admins would need a lot of training to do the same job. Hackers are always looking for a way into your organization no matter how small you are, and on-premises servers are simply more vulnerable because they do not have the power of Amazon, Microsoft, or Google security engineers behind them.

PaaS stands for Platform as a Service. It is a cloud computing model that provides hardware, software, and infrastructure for developing, running, and managing applications in the cloud. This means developers don’t need to spend time setting up the infrastructure such as servers, networks, storage, operating systems, and development environments. Having an on-premises development environment can be costly and time consuming. Development environments are increasingly found easily in the cloud, and it doesn’t make sense to develop on-premises for most business domains. Additionally, there are many open-source projects and development environments in the PaaS world. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Microsoft Azure App Services and Google App engine are examples of PaaS Solutions. They all allow multiple programming languages and give developers the freedom to build, test, scale and deploy software.

The last service, SaaS, stands for Software as a service. It is a cloud computing model where a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the internet. There are over 200 SaaS applications in the Cloud, some that you or your family use every day. Ever heard of Workday, the HR system? Or Microsoft 365, the whole suite of office applications? What about Turbo Tax? When you hear someone say it’s an app in the cloud, it’s a SaaS product.

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