Thursday, March 27, 2014

Don’t Get Lost in the Nomenclature of Cloud Computing

Courtesy dreamstime.com
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Database as as Service (DBaaS). Most recently Google had come out with a model that molds PaaS and IaaS together. Hardly a week goes by before another definition of these popular buzzwords comes out. How much coverage does each provide? How far up the stack does it go? Is it a pure play or a hybrid? Public cloud or private cloud?

Some of the confusion is driven by the difficulties in understanding the exact functional boundaries and the provider-specific decisions that drive the architecture of each type of cloud-based service. But also, as each type of cloud service continues to evolve, the lines between technologies are starting to blur making it even more difficult to differentiate between them.

What seems to be altogether omitted from the conversation so far is the value that these cloud technologies are bringing to both the business and consumer audiences that use the services. What specific problems are they helping to solve? What issues or pain points are they helping the customer to avoid?

In the buzz created by the release of the latest, most definitive definition, the voice of the customer gets lost. What the cloud service provider community should start to focus on is going back to listening, and understanding where customers need to go, and then identifying the best vehicle(s) to take them there.

Rachel, Dan, & Dmitry

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