In a Jerry Held post I just praised, there was one thing I disagreed with. Jerry wrote of cloud analytics:
This shouldn't be confused with software as a service (SaaS) models. Cloud customers are, in effect, renting dedicated servers and the people needed to house, secure, and manage them. These cloud offerings are more secure than multi-tenant SaaS models in which data from one customer may co-exist with data from another customer within the same application. Cloud customers have full control over server and firewall settings to ensure security.
To me, that sounds like an exaggerated distinction. Jerry is indeed right that there's a difference in whether what's exposed to you on a remote basis is application or system software. Application software users generally don't get to mess around with database administration or firewall settings. System software users generally do.
But multi-tenancy vs. single tenancy shared vs. single tenancy dedicated servers? Those are just differences in the feature sets. If I moved my blogs to dedicated servers, because I was tired of the outages caused by bad scripts running in other applications on my host, that wouldn't mean I was using a fundamentally different kind of service. It would simply mean I was willing to pay up for certain features, just as I now refuse to use a web host that doesn't employ separate firewall appliances to defend against the kind of email floods that brought my blogs down last December.
Am I an outlier here? Or do most people agree that cloud computing is just a particular way of delivering SaaS?
Curt Monash is a leading analyst of and strategic advisor to the software industry. Praised by Lawrence J. Ellison for his "unmatched insight into technology and marketplace trends," Curt was the software/services industry's #1 ranked stock analyst while at PaineWebber, Inc., where he served as a First Vice President until 1987. He subsequently co-founded Evernet, Inc., a $40 million networking systems integrator. Since 1990, he has owned and operated Monash Research, an analysis and advisory firm covering software-intensive sectors of the technology industry. In that period he also has been co-founder, president, or chairman of several other technology startups.
Curt has served as a strategic advisor to many well-known firms, including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AOL, CA, and Netezza. Curt earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (Game Theory) from Harvard University. He has held faculty positions in mathematics, economics and public policy at Harvard, Yale, and Suffolk universities.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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SaaS is a subset of cloud computing
Curt, I also disagree with Jerry, actually on a couple of fronts. First, I don't believe cloud platform offerings that Jerry mentioned is inherently more secure than SaaS. I see no supporting evidence of that. Second, I agree with you the distinction Jerry drew is fairly artificial. I wrote about this in my blog last week, in fact. Cloud computing really consist of "cloud platforms" and "cloud applications." Cloud applications are essentially SaaS applications.
All cloud computing is SaaS, but is all SaaS cloud computing
Jian,
It seems we agree that (almost) all cloud computing is SaaS, unless the software is used only by the enterprise that owns it. But I'm not sure I'd agree that all SaaS is cloud computing. I think of "cloud computing" as not just remote or time-shared computing, but also as having some sort of a "grid" aspect.
Best,
CAM
Terminology
I agree with Jerry Held that customers can reasonably expect to have a higher confidence that their data will be kept private if they know that their own data does not reside on the same machine as some other customer's data.
However, I don't think this is such a huge distinction that I'd use it to distinguish "SaaS" from "Cloud Computing". For example, at my own company, we provide Saas insofar as our customers primarily use our service by sending us a query over the net and getting a reply. Each customer has its own dedicated servers, for various reasons such as performance and reliability guarantees, and security to some degree. It's not cloud computing; it would be much more like cloud computing if we dynamically assigned servers to customers based on, e.g., current load.
(Also, it gets more complicated once you start using virtual machine software, e.g. VMWare! Then what
counts as being on a "separate machine"?)
So I agree with you, Curt. It's a genuine distinction, but just one of many, and it's not what defines cloud computing.
I disagree with Jerry as
I disagree with Jerry as well. SaaS is much more secure than having in house software that takes a lot of time to install and maintain. If a system crashes a SaaS server like MTI's Brick N Click for eBay, the data can be easily recovered by staff, rather than the amount of time it would take to recover data with in-house software. Thus I would argue that SaaS is more safe, as long as the security setting are industry standard. You should read about this interesting retail SaaS technology http://www.mtiretail.com/SaaS_Info.cfm) or take their webinar to learn more (http://www.mtiretail.com/BrickNClick.cfm?PgID=1).
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