With the emergence of the cloud, businesses gained opportunities to solve a bunch of problems related to maintenance, scalability, and growth. However, to gain the most out of the technology, it’s essential to approach the strategy thoughtfully.
Why? Just deciding in favor of cloud adoption and waiting for it to magically resolve all issues in the blink of an eye is definitely not productive. Providers offer multiple services, which must be selected wisely, based on your needs and goals, if turning your software into a money pit is not included in your plans.
When you’re just starting your cloud journey, one of the first things to decide is the model you are going to utilize to maintain your software. There are three of them: IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS — and all have their strong and weak points.
How to select the best-suited cloud computing model and not lose? Why the SaaS option is the most stress-free, convenient, and secure option of choice? Why IaaS, in its turn, is the most popular and flexible one, and is there a possibility to combine different cloud service models? We explore these questions and more in our latest blog post.
Key Highlights
- With SaaS, you use fully managed apps; PaaS provides tools to build your own; IaaS gives raw infrastructure with flexibility.
- Choosing the right cloud computing delivery model depends on your budget and how much infrastructure responsibility you’re ready to handle.
- Migrating between cloud models is possible, but complexity increases with codebase age and legacy systems.
- A hybrid approach can offer significant savings in time, cost, and resource optimization.
Starting from Basic Comparison of Cloud Models
To have a better understanding of these three cloud computing delivery models, let’s consider a simple example. For instance, you need transportation and have three options to select from: your personal car, a rented one, or a car with a driver.
Infrastructure as a Service
IaaS is like owning your own car. You’re in charge of everything — from maintenance and fuel to navigation and driving. While it requires more responsibility and effort, it gives you full control, flexibility, and the ability to customize everything to your needs.
The same principle applies to the IaaS model. It’s the most basic and popular option offered by cloud providers. By selecting this one, you rent a set of infrastructure components, needed to maintain your application. These are cloud storage, data centers, servers — put simply, the entire infrastructure your software can’t function without.
Within the space, you are free to install the operational system and databases, all that’s required from you —- is to maintain it in working condition. Yes, this model implies that the provider leases all necessary tools, while design and deployment are your full responsibility. Meanwhile, this option offers the highest level of flexibility.
Platform as a Service
Choosing PaaS is like renting a car. Just like with IaaS, you’re still behind the wheel and decide where to go, but the rental company takes care of all the technical maintenance. You don’t worry about engine issues or oil changes — everything is ready for you to focus on the ride.
With the PaaS model, you receive a ready-made platform, which you can use to develop and deploy your application. While servers, databases, and care about timely updates is your cloud provider’s task to tackle.
If you need to concentrate on the code only, without distractions at infrastructure maintenance, this option is right for you. Upload the code, and the platform will do everything for you: database connection, server fine-tuning, and application function monitoring.
Software as a Service
And the final option — SaaS— is like hiring a car with a driver. It’s an all-inclusive experience: you don’t have to worry about driving, maintenance, or choosing the best route. Everything is handled for you, so you can just sit back, relax, and focus on your destination.
Opting for SaaS, you use a ready-made application via a browser. You don’t need to deal with complex configurations and maintenance. From here stems the fact that you don’t have to employ a team of DevOps professionals, and all hassles related to infrastructure orchestration lie on your provider. Sounds great, isn’t it? However, there’s one thing to keep in mind: this pleasure is far from cheap.
Good Choice: What Does It Depend on?
Predictable, but as always, disappointing answer: it depends. Here, it’s built on your project type, goals, resources, and responsibility you are ready to take on yourself.
The scale of your business plays a key role, too. For example, if you’re just starting out, it’s likely you’re working with a limited budget and trying to manage everything on your own. In this case, IaaS often becomes the go-to option — it gives you flexibility and control while keeping costs relatively manageable if you have the technical know-how.
As the business grows and your team and budget expand, so do your priorities. You may not want to spend time managing servers or worrying about infrastructure updates. Instead, you’d rather focus on building product features and delivering value to your users. That’s when PaaS becomes a smarter choice — offloading operational tasks while still giving developers the opportunity to concentrate on code quality.
And finally, when your operations are large-scale and standardized, and you’re looking for maximum simplicity, reliability, and minimal maintenance effort — SaaS becomes the natural step. With everything managed for you, you can focus purely on your business without worrying about the tech stack behind it.
Transferring from One Model to Another — Why and How?
From the previous paragraph, we might conclude that going with IaaS is the only wise option to start with. However, it’s not that straightforward, and starting from SaaS might be the most rational and reasonable path to take.
Why so? Because it might be a great opportunity to test the waters in a smart way. By using a ready-made SaaS solution, you can validate your business model, explore your product-market fit, and get clarity on what you actually need in terms of infrastructure. It’s a safe, stable, and fully managed environment that frees you to focus on your product and customers — not the plumbing behind it.
And here’s the hidden benefit: through real-world usage, you’ll gain insights into your actual resource consumption, preferred feature set, and hardware requirements. This knowledge can later guide you in switching to PaaS or IaaS, if or when the time is right. Sure thing, if hiring a seasoned team of DevOps engineers would turn out to be cheaper than paying for the SaaS model.
Dive into SaaS Pricing Models and Strategies
Risky and Not Easy. The Realities of the Transferring Process
If you think that switching to another cloud always goes safely and smoothly, this assumption is far from the truth. The transferring period is quite complex, resource-intensive, and holds security risks. Let’s review some of the most pressing pain points of cloud delivery model transfer below.
Codebase Goes Obsolete
Cloud providers typically update database versions every two years. While this ensures better performance and security, it can create real complications when migrating to a newer cloud-based setup.
Let’s say you’ve been running a stable business for over a decade, managing your infrastructure through an IaaS model and relying on a perfectly functional, yet outdated, database like PostgreSQL 10. If you decide to move to a SaaS environment, keep in mind: your current database version likely won’t be supported. You’ll have no other choice than to migrate your data to a more modern version offered by the provider.
At first glance, this might not seem like a big deal. You get access to the latest tech, right? But in practice, moving your data isn’t always smooth.
If your database is small and simple, your provider might be able to handle the upgrade automatically. But for large, complex systems holding terabytes of data, things get tricky. Automatic migration becomes unfeasible, and you’re looking at a full-scale, manual migration project.
That means high costs, architectural considerations, downtime risks, and the need for experienced specialists to pull it off correctly. So while SaaS adoption has many advantages, database migration is a challenge that must not be underestimated, especially if we speak about legacy systems.
Security-Related Issues
If your data are transferred automatically by a provider, the risk of data leakage is 99.9% excluded. All thanks to standardized protocols, encrypted channels, and tightly controlled environments. However, if you approach manual migration, the situation is completely different, and in most cases, the human factor becomes the weakest link in this chain.
Manual database migration often requires direct access to production environments, administrative credentials, data export/import operations, and intermediate storage. Each step reveals potential vulnerabilities, whether it’s through improper handling of credentials, temporary storage of sensitive data in unprotected environments, or simple mistakes during data transformation. Even experienced teams are not immune to misconfigurations or overlooked security policies under tight deadlines and complex data structures.
Moreover, during manual migration, it’s common to involve third-party tools or temporary external systems for data validation, which further expands the attack surface. If these tools or environments are not properly vetted, your sensitive business information could be unintentionally exposed.
You might reasonably ask: Why should I migrate my data to SaaS storage if my current setup works fine and migration itself involves risks? The key reason lies in the superior security architecture provided by modern SaaS platforms.
Explore the main SaaS Security Risks
Unlike traditional storage, SaaS solutions offer a highly secure, isolated environment designed so that not even the provider can access your data. You’re essentially given a virtual machine where you define the configuration: processors, memory, storage — and this infrastructure is distributed across multiple geographic locations. This distribution enhances both fault tolerance and data protection.
Moreover, the storage is encrypted and fragmented in such a way that even if someone were to gain physical access to a disk, it would appear as meaningless data. The provider doesn’t know what data belongs to whom, and even in the rare event of a breach at their level, there’s virtually no risk of identifiable data being exposed.
Find out how to ensure Bullet-Proof Protection for Cloud Application Security
Take the Most Out of Hybrid Model. Real-Life Example of Our Client
Each type of cloud service model, be it IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, has its strengths and limitations, which often makes the selection process challenging. But the good news is, you don’t have to choose just one. In fact, combining multiple cloud delivery models to create a hybrid architecture can be a much more strategic and cost-effective approach, depending on your business needs.
Discover more about Cloud Cost Optimization
One of our clients, a long-established customs bond service provider, faced this exact dilemma. They had been operating a legacy system hosted on on-premises servers for years. To modernize their infrastructure, reduce the maintenance burden, and support future scalability, they partnered with Velvetech to lead their cloud migration initiative.
After evaluating their use case, we recommended a hybrid cloud model, to ensure even resource distribution and, therefore, cost efficiency.
Here’s how their architecture works:
- IaaS handles light day-to-day operations, giving them control and flexibility without the cost of overprovisioned services.
- SaaS is used for resource-intensive tasks, such as processing a continuous flow of customs revenue messages, leveraging its scalability and performance.
- When incoming data includes malformed symbols or low-quality scanned documents, PaaS steps in for efficient pre-processing and error handling.
This hybrid approach ensures a well-balanced use of resources, avoids overloading their main infrastructure, and delivers both cost savings and performance efficiency.
Read how we conducted Cloud Migration for a Customs Bond Service Provider
Conclusion
Handling service models of cloud computing smartly opens the door to scalability, flexibility, and long-term savings — but only if approached strategically and in alignment with your business’s unique needs.
Not sure whether a SaaS model, PaaS, IaaS, or a combo of the three is right for you? We’re here to help you not to get lost in the abundance of cloud services and help you make a choice that’s both effective and cost-efficient. Get in touch with us, and we’ll help you navigate the cloud with confidence!
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