Saturday 2 December 2017

Choosing the right service .

"Yehi hai right choice baby.." 

If you grew up in 90's in India, then this jingle must be familiar to you. A popular Cola giant has entered into the Indian market and was trying hard to penetrate in the urban and rural Indian market and get a solid grip. And then they used these few words and the rest is history.

 It is our choices indeed that determine our experiences. The choices we are making today will show up in our experiences in the future. So when it comes to picking up something from a bouquet of options, you have to choose the right one so that you can also say, yes yehi hai right choice baby [this is the right one for me].

In one of my previous blogs, I had discussed about whether CRM on cloud is a good option or not. In this blog I will discuss what the various cloud models that are currently available are and how to choose the best one that works for your business.

Honestly speaking there is not a “one Cloud fits all” solution.  On a very general level, there are 3 types of cloud offerings that are available in the market. They are SaaS, IaaS and PaaS.

So, what are they?  I know many of us have already seen the definition of each of them in internet. But today instead of re-uttering the same old definition, I thought of giving you a nice analogy that one of my managers once explained to me describing these types. It is about coffee as a service.


Consider that you want to enjoy a cup of coffee. What will you do? You have multiple options. You can make the coffee yourself at home or go out and get into a coffee shop or call for a home delivery and enjoy.

Let’s say, you are a coffee enthusiast and want to prepare the coffee at home. In that case you need to arrange all the necessary elements and spend considerable amount of time before you can enjoy the same. You might also run into the risk of disproportions of the elements which can spoil the taste as well.  So this depicts the example of Service on Premise.

On the other hand, you can opt to just go out, place the order, wait for your hot steaming cup of coffee and then enjoy. The chances of running into trouble with it are less as it is being made by professionals and they are kind of pro in it. This depicts the cloud SaaS model where you just need to give your requirement and your application will be up and ready to use in cloud.

In between these two offerings, there are two other offerings. Let us take the same Coffee as a service example. Imagine that, you want to still prepare your coffee but few part of the process, like brewing, grinding, roasting etc you want someone/thing else to do for you that is with a help of a coffee making machine. This hybrid model depicts the theory of Infrastructure as a Service.

And the last one is where you don’t want to go out and at the same time you don’t want to prepare it as well. In that case you prefer to call home delivery where apart from table and chair, everything else will be provided by the coffee makers. This is in line to what we call PaaS or Platform as a Service model offers.

So this is more or less what I understood from my mentor regarding various cloud service offering models. Below is a pictorial representation of both Coffee as a Service and Cloud as a Service.









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