Image by Daniel Iversen
Cloud has completely changed the way people share files and data, both on a social and a business level. This change is, in my humble opinion, set to affect the whole western world and the UK is no different.
What most people don’t know is that there is more to Cloud storage than just uploading your pictures to iCloud with your iPhone. It’s often quite hard to understand what each type of cloud storage does, so here is the explanation of the 3 methods most in use today.
SaaS – Software as a Service
This is what most people use: think of iCloud, Google Docs or Microsoft Skydrive. Basically the software that provides the cloud service is an application that heavily depends on the operating system and computer it’s installed on.
In other words you access the application that lets you see your files on Skydrive and lets you move your folders around, upload and download photos and so on.
You can access such applications through a web browser or simply by downloading a small (…well) app onto your desktop which will connect to the Cloud service.
PaaS – Platform as a Service
This is one step back from SaaS, and it’s probably what most business employees deal with. Basically somewhere in a world far, far away (or even just down the road) there is a server which contains all shared data. This differs from SaaS because rather than just accessing the an application that filters data and limits the functions you can perform, you can actually access the servers themselves.
Such servers have an installed operating system and some basic software that allows it to interact with other computers.
Applications can then be developed to offer a SaaS service if required, or the various computers can simply be networked to each other so that data is shared amongst them.
This option gives better options for security and data protection than SaaS.
IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service
This is the raw and very basic hardware structure. It’s just your servers, nothing is on them, you install everything, including the operating systems and every tiny application you want it to run.
The service doesn’t only offer physical machines, it might be provided through virtual machines. Basically virtual machines allow you to run multiple operating systems with one computer, giving you the impression you are running several computers while in fact you are only running one.
This is a good way to utilize all the resources of a very powerful machine where they would otherwise be wasted when running only one operating system.
With this system model, the customer is the one responsible for updating and patching their system, with total control over security and data protection.
No matter the type service you use want to use, it’s worth looking into companies that offer services for UK and London collocation to speed up your company’s business. The faster your employees can interact with each other, the better the workload will flow.
See, that wasn’t so bad was it? Or was it?