As a general rule, there are three agreed upon deployement models (or categories in ISO/IEC 17788), which are:

‘Software-as-a-Service’ (or SaaS), which is software that can be used as soon as you subscribe (e.g. Microsoft Office 365 or Intuit Quickbooks accounting software).

Further down into the Technology stack, there is Platform-as-a-Service’ (PaaS). This model provides the customer with traditional servers, network devices and databases for you to configure as required. This model transfers the hassle of procuring and physical hosting of equipment onto the Cloud Service Provider.

Finally, there is ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ (IaaS) which provides resources within a series of Data Centres. These logical devices must be provisioned, designed and configured according to your business requirements (e.g. AWS, Azure, UKCloud).

ISO/IEC 17788 defines the following additional categories:

Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS), Compute-as-a-Services (CompaaS), Data Storage-as-a-Service (DSaaS), and Network-as-a-Service (NaaS).

If you would like advice and guidance with a digital transformation programme to move your IT services to the cloud, but are unsure which model meets your business requirements, then MIC Solutions Ltd would be delighted to hear from you.