Flavors of Cloud

Cloud can be presented in three flavors. They are

· Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS), Eg: Amazon web services[ Amazon EC2], Rackspace etc

· Platform-as-a-Service (PAAS) Eg: Microsoft Azure Platform, Google App Engine. and

· Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) Eg: SalesForce.com, Google Apps, Microsoft BPOs, Office365, SharePoint Online.

Depending upon the customer’s needs, one of the formats of cloud offering can be adopted. The benefits of each of the above flavors vary. In a nutshell, the benefits of the cloud offerings can be shown as under for the various flavors.