Are you confused with all the buzz words surrounding cloud computing? The market has in fact exhausted the subject and made it confusing by using terms like “Enterprise Cloud”, “Private Cloud”, “Public Cloud”, “Virtual Cloud” and “Government Cloud”.

Here’s a rough breakdown of what cloud computing is really all about:

• Software-as-a-Service(SaaS): This type of cloud computing delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multi-tenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing. Industry practiced has proven that Salesforce.com is by far the best-known example among enterprise SaaS applications for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products.

Benefits: OpEx, not CapEx, Up and running in “weeks”, constant innovation from the provider.

• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): These providers deliver Software Development Environments as a service. You build your own applications that run on the provider’s infrastructure which is then delivered to your users via the Internet from the provider’s servers. You benefit from not buying and maintaining servers, as well as eliminating the time required to deploy the app, run load tests, monitor, tune and scale the app server and database, and conduct regression tests on every app at any time changes occur in any layer of the software stack! Forrester Research lists Salesforce.com’s Force.com as the strategy leader in this field. Other popular services include the Google App Engine, Microsoft’s Azure platform and Heroku.

Benefits: Build apps three to five times faster with a 50% cost saving, as per IDC.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): This form of cloud computing is getting new life from Amazon.com, Rackspace, IBM, and others who now offer storage and virtual servers that IT can access on demand. Early enterprise adopters mainly use utility computing for supplemental, non-mission-critical needs, but in the future, they may replace parts of the data-center.

Benefits: Hardware Cost Savings

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