IaaS works best for organizations that have the resources and skills to manage the entire application and infrastructure stack on their own. The elasticity of the cloud is what they mostly want to leverage while ensuring a higher level of customization. This offers great flexibility around fine-tuning the application components for maximum performance and control.
It is equally important to highlight that in the absence of cloud skills or resources, the teams can still benefit from the PaaS capabilities by utilizing certain AWS services. This allows them to focus on just writing code. Then, the PaaS layer wires it together with the infrastructure layer by offering additional workflows around code release, integration, and infrastructure scaling.
Business requirements
Business requirements and priorities can sometimes influence the overall IT strategy in interesting ways. Time-constrained project rollouts and proof of concepts align better with PaaS offerings as there isn’t a pressing need for building the entire infrastructure up.
Building another Slack or Mailchimp service is probably not the most important thing you want to focus on. In such cases, signing up for SaaS services is usually the best option. This avoids investing time in things that are not in alignment with the business outcome.
Once a certain size of the organization is comfortable with these PaaS offerings, it paves the way for establishing best practices around these services and sharing them with other teams in the company. If you are time-constrained, have fewer resources, or don’t care for a lot of customization but rather wish to get to the market sooner, then PaaS is certainly an option you should look into.
Security considerations
SaaS offerings are mostly multi-tenant systems, which means that a single instance of the software is used by several customers. Any security breach or threat has a big impact, as customers would lose their data. These systems are also prone to noisy neighbor problems, where a faulty tenant can affect the service availability of other customers hosted on the same server.
For applications where data and infrastructure security are absolutely critical, it makes more sense to use IaaS offerings. Organizations then have full control over data encryption, for example, to enhance security posture and meet their regulatory requirements. AWS offers the possibility to use customer-managed encryption keys that ensure a good level of trust around data security and compliance needs.
All these aspects need to be considered in tandem with how your organization operates. What is your organization’s operating model? Let’s take a deeper look.