Cloud is a wide concept and covers an exhaustive range of services for the online businesses. There are three ways in which these services are delivered. Users draw the services via the internet and subscribe to the services they want and are billed on the pay-as -you-use model. The three
cloud services are:
1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):Computing infrastructure such as
cloud storage, networks, servers, processing power etc. is delivered for use by the consumers on a subscription basis. The customers need not have to purchase, deploy and maintain the infrastructure. The main use of IaaS is the actual development and deployment of all the SaaS and PaaS applications. The users can scale their requirements as per their business demands.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS providers create an environment offering a platform on which the developers can develop and deploy software applications. The users can use the server software, database management system, operating systems, network infrastructure and more. The services are highly scalable.
3. Software as a Service(SaaS): The consumers do not have to procure licenses and deploy the software such as tracking sales, accounting and invoicing, performance monitoring, communications including web-mail and more on their computers. The users can close the services as and when they no longer require it.