Cloud Vs. SaaS - is there a difference?

Domo · 25 Apr 2013 at 09:50

I've been looking online and various sources say different things - so I thought I'd put it to you lot

Is is fair to describe a SaaS application, e.g. a vendor hosted CRM application - as a cloud solution? Or is this misuse of the term cloud?

DanF · 25 Apr 2013 at 10:20

Sure why not

I think cloud is a very general term and SaaS is a more specific part of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

Jeci · 25 Apr 2013 at 10:26

DanF said:
Sure why not I think cloud is a very general term and SaaS is a more specific part of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

Yes I'd go along with this really.

Cloud to me is pooling of on or off premise computational resource to be leveraged dynamically.

SaaS leverages cloud infrastructure but for a static purpose, that is, for a specific application or service.

uniQ · 25 Apr 2013 at 10:58

It's a category of cloud computing. Much the same as PaaS (Platform as a Service)

helium · 25 Apr 2013 at 17:37

SaaS doesn't necessarily have to be on a cloud based platform. To be fair they usually are, but selling something as SaaS can be run off a shared virtual server if needed and you could scale in a more traditional model managing all your own load balancing etc.

So to the original question. If the CRM solution is hosted on some kind of cloud architecture then yeah.

NathanE · 26 Apr 2013 at 09:26

uniQ said:
It's a category of cloud computing. Much the same as PaaS (Platform as a Service)

Not really. You can do SaaS without cloud. You can host a SaaS application on your own dedicated server in a colo rack, for instance.

It's also increasingly common to build SaaS products on top of cloud architectures, such as PaaS. Or just IaaS (which is basically just the cloud form of VPS).