To lead up to Johan’s webinar next month on new nonprofit cloud strategies and what we’ve learned over the last years with our clients at Community IT Innovators, I dipped back a bit for some definitions of all those acronyms.
The concepts aren’t complicated, and your organization has probably already implemented or contracted with a cloud service that falls under these categories. To better understand how nonprofits are using the cloud and where cloud computing is heading, join us June 21st when Johan will review the latest trends we are seeing, and how to put cloud applications in place that benefit your nonprofit, not just the provider.
From TechSoup last June, Jim Lynch reviews the types of cloud-based software out there and gives a great run-down of the terminology.
Although geared towards businesses not nonprofits, Rackspace (a large managed services provider) has a good and basic white paper that outlines the concepts and gives a few case studies from the business world.
From Rackspace “Cloud Computing is a broad term that describes a broad range of services. As with other significant developments in technology, many vendors have seized the term “Cloud” and are using it for products that sit outside of the common definition… Since the Cloud is a broad collection of services, organizations can choose where, when, and how they use Cloud Computing. In this report we … explain the different types of Cloud Computing services commonly referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and give some examples and case studies to illustrate how they all work.”