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server is under the project's control from the BIOS up, and is sufficient for
the requirements of the initial phase.
In the second phase, where it becomes apparent that this customer service
is being more heavily utilised than estimated, it will be useful to take action
to ensure better scalability and availability. For this reason, phase II of the
project envisages optimizing the project for PaaS. Phase II comprises a
redesign of the web application, accommodation for Microsoft SQL Azure
and the use of Microsoft Azure as a PaaS. This removes the need to maintain
the serverOperating Systems, the webserver, the database and complex
backups, etc., as in phase I of the project. If the web application turns out to
be interesting for third parties, phase III of the project envisages adding
multi‐tenant capabilities to the application, with separate user
management, etc. The plan for phase III is to offer the software for use by
customers, and thus providing it as SaaS.
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3.1.7
Cloud Service commonly used today
Smartphone and Tablet users are consuming a vast range of Cloud services,
without even realising it. Some of these services are mandatory to the
operation of these devices e.g. Appstores, update services, etc. Several
other services are either convenient or are supporting the business process.
We will look into the service supporting the business process here.
Storage Clouds (Storage as a Service)
There are a variety of services in the Cloud offering storage space, most of
them have a free of charge entry‐level. These services are typically
end‐user‐oriented and often allow users to store only specific data types.
The most popular examples of end‐user oriented offerings are DropBox,
SugarSync, Google Drive, etc. There are also products of this kind which are
more focused on businesses, where security, access control, access groups,
reporting and storage location are the main focus. Examples of these
offerings are Citrix Sharefile, Microsoft SkyDrive, Wuala, etc. In addition to
the pure gigabytes of storage these services can offer online editing, printing
or preview functions.
Other services can be viewed more as outsourced backup solutions; again
there are many options for end users, and a number in the enterprise
sector. It is interesting to see that the acceptance of this kind of solution is
greater in large corporations than in small to mid‐sized businesses. This is
mainly attributed to the fact that large corporations structure and
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An expanded version of this chapter can be found under
