One of the tracks at Catalyst this year focussed on Cloud Computing, and included sessions from Burton Group analysts, customers and cloud service providers. Burton Group made a point of distinguishing the different types of cloud services that are currently available:

Hardware / Infrastructure as a Service

Services that allow you to run your OS and software on top of virtualized servers, storage and networking: Amazon (EC2, S3, etc.), Rackspace Cloud, various Virtual Private Server vendors, etc.

Platform as a Service

Services that provide a development platform, where you have no view into the OS or infrastructure and are bound to a particular application development environment: Salesforce’s force.com, Google AppEngine, EngineYard, etc.

Application / Software as a Service

Services that provide applications directly to users, sometimes with opportunities to integrate with in-house apps and services (e.g. authentication) – Google Apps, Zoho, Microsoft Office Live, Salesforce, Basecamp

Read more »