Buying the right cloud solution
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- Created: Monday, 13 July 2020
- Written by Jonathan Hobson
A few of our clients have been sold cloud solutions, only to find they weren't quite what they were expecting.
They expected something that ran in a web browser. This approach is called SaaS or Software as a Service. The application itself runs in the cloud and you interact with it via a web browser. Things like webmail or internet banking are examples of SaaS. All computers have web-browsers and all users know how to use them. No special software is needed and you can access it from anywhere you have a web browser and internet . A disadvantage to this approach is that the software may look and feel different to the application you are used to. So some user training may be needed.
However, the solutions they purchased required logging on to a remote desktop and running the application from there. This may have the advantage that the software is very similar to the on-premise application they are used to. But it comes with extra baggage: you need a piece of software to log on to the remote system, you might need training in using this remote desktop, accessing other resources (printers, emails, files) not on the remote system is possible, but difficult. It’s impractical to access this type of service from a mobile. This type of cloud solution is known as IaaS or Infrastructure as a service - the server and desktop infrastructure are running in the cloud.
There is a third type of cloud solution called PaaS, Platform as a Service. This allows you to develop your own program to run on the cloud. It is typically for software developers or for in-house software.
They’re all cloud solutions - but offer a very different experience. We help our clients explore the pros and cons of different solutions to help them understand which one will work best for them. To understand which cloud solutions would work best for you:
