How to decide when to pass on PaaS
April 10, 2013
Grazed from The Register. Author: Dale Vile.
Most forms of cloud computing are starting to find a place in mainstream IT delivery. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), for example, is providing greater flexibility and better economy for those wanting to grab server or storage capacity from the cloud. It might not be totally replacing other forms of infrastructure hosting but the offerings in this space are mature enough for prime time and provide significant advantages in many scenarios.
The delivery of business applications over the wire (or air) on a subscription basis via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is also now well established. Whether it is in email, office or information management, or more complex solutions such as CRM or ERP, we are again some distance from world domination but mainstream use is clearly growing. We are certainly beyond the early adoption stage among larger enterprises…
Meanwhile, the picture with platform as a service (PaaS) is a lot less clear-cut. It is hard to make generalised statements because of ambiguity about what exactly PaaS is and where it fits. Before we can have a sensible conversation about the role of PaaS in mainstream IT delivery, we need to quickly review some of its basic principles and variants…
Read more from the source @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/10/cloud_paas/