Cloud For The Feds – Salesforce Obtains Federal Certification
June 1, 2014
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.
Yesterday it was the news that former bitter rivals, Salesforce and Microsoft, has found new love and respect and had entered into a broad-ranging partnership. Today Salesforce scored another coup with the announcement that it is the first vendor to be granted Federal Certification for both Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) has long been the holy grail for cloud infrastructure vendors – since its introduction back in 2011 a number of infrastructure vendors have obtained certification. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard among them.
But until now FedRAMP hadn’t covered the higher levels of the cloud stack, SaaS and PaaS. While this might sound like a confusing series of acronyms, it is actually pretty important. Infrastructure as a Service allows organizations to essentially buy servers on demand. Instead of having to buy physical boxes, build data centers and wrangle the details of running the same, they can instead “hire” infrastructure from a cloud vendor…
PaaS takes this benefit but adds more value on top of it. PaaS gives organizations a development environment, access to a broad series of modular components that are useful when building applications, and the ability to automatically scale application on demand. At the top level we have SaaS, which replaces installed, on-premises software with software obtained via a web browser and generally acquired on a subscription basis…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/06/01/cloud-for-the-feds-salesforce-obtains-federal-certification/