Are You on the Cloud?

I am pretty sure that most of technical people are aware about the technical term "cloud", and even can give some kind of description about what does it mean. The well known association of the cloud computing is with the software as a service, SaaS. However, there are more and more areas of IT services which are moving to the cloud. So, knowing the acronyms for such cases is a part of the IT literacy.

I have filled a survey today "Managing Cloud Applications" posted by the The Office of the CIO®  in collaboration with Katepano SaaS Monitoring and Optimization which reminded me about my intention to create this post and to list all abbreviations.

Here is the list of the cloud services that I am aware of:

PaaS - Platform as a Service
 BaaS - Backup as a Service
BPaaS - Business Process as a Service
CaaS - Communication, Content, and Computing as a Service
DaaS - Database as a Service DaaS ( another one) - Desktop as a Service
IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
IDaaS -  Identity as a Service
MaaS - Monitoring/Management as a Service
NaaS - Network as a Service
SaaS ( another one) - Storage as a Service
SECaaS - Security as a Service
UCaaS - Unified Communications as a Service
APMaaS - APM (Application Performance Management) as a Service 
LaaS - logging as a service 

Here are some other acronyms that go together with the cloud:
SOA - Service Oriented Architecture
SOCCI - Service Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure

As you can see, there are so many IT service already on the cloud that they are even reusing the same surnames. According to industry definition by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, the "as a service" acronym formed a category XaaS which unites all cloud-related services.

The IaaS was pioneered by Amazon. UCaaS becomes a popular because it is easy to outsource. The MaaS is almost a requirement for IT that uses cloud.  The NaaS is a choice for the mature large companies because they want to get out of the IT business.

According to the market forecasts, by the 2015 year the XaaS market will be more then $40 billions. Microsoft's latest strategy shift to the cloud with its offering of the SkyDrive cloud storage service and cloud-based Office 365 is a strong evidence of the industry shift to the cloud.

So, are you YOU on the cloud? Do you use other then listed above services?


Resources: NETWORK WORLD, August 13, 2012. Volume 29, Number 14.