More and more companies are following the steps of early adopters of cloud computing and making strategies for cloud migration due to the list of enticing business benefits of the cloud that is only getting longer as the new ways for successful mitigation of risks involved with cloud adoption are emerging. As the technology itself is maturing, so are the ways to make the migration to the cloud more effective and its benefits more tangible. With a proper planning and the right choice of the cloud solution and solution provider, companies can truly capitalize on the benefits offered by the cloud in the form of reduced costs and capital expenditures, increased operational efficiencies, scalability, flexibility, immediate time to market, and so on. 
If your organization is considering to adopt cloud computing for certain parts of your IT, the most fundamental move is to determine what are the exact problems you are looking to solve by leveraging a cloud solution and what business goals you want to achieve. Secondly, you need to identify which areas of your organization's IT holds the greatest potential for optimization using cloud computing. It is also important to know which application makes the most sense to deploy into cloud. Cloud environment is usually the best fit for development, testing, internal company apps, such as CRM, collaboration, etc.
The process of cloud assessment is very complex and encompasses many factors non of which can be overlooked if a company wants to ensure successful cloud onboarding. This is why organizations often search for the guidance of expert cloud consultants for cloud readiness evaluation. Cloud consultants can coordinate with your internal IT department to assess your company's cloud readiness covering all major cloud computing architectures, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Software-as-a-Service.
Understanding of the key aspects of cloud computing and its core architectures is vital to pursuing the right cloud computing solution. Each company chooses a cloud service and a deployment model based on their specific business, operational, and technical requirements. Here we will in short introduce the three cloud service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) which can serve as a foundation for further developing your understanding of cloud computing and its capabilities. You can read definitions of the primary Cloud Deployment Models ( private cloud, community cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud) in our recent cloud computing article.
Cloud Service Models:
- Software as a Service (SaaS).SaaS is a software model provided by the vendor through an online service. User doesn't have to install or maintain SaaS application. Software is running on a provider's cloud infrastructure and a user can access it via web browser. With SaaS, vendor makes the required software available to a business on subscription basis, and charges are based on the product usage. SaaS model can save companies the expense on buying hardware and software and it removes the maintenance costs.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS enables companies to develop applications more quickly and efficiently in a cloud environment using programming languages and tools supported by the provider. The provider is responsible for maintenance and control of the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, and operating systems. PaaS services provide a great deal of flexibility allowing companies to build PaaS environments on demand with no capital expenditures.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). With IaaS, a company can rent fundamental computing resources for deploying and running applications or storing data. It enables companies to deliver applications more efficiently by removing the complexities involved with managing their own infrastructure. IaaS enables fast deployment of applications, and improves the agility of IT services by instantly adding computing processing power and storage capacity when needed.
