Helping a customer to move away from physical datacentres and into the cloud has been an exciting project to work on but my scope was purely the Microsoft workstream: migrating to Office 365 and a virtual datacentre in Azure. There’s much more to be done to move towards the consumption of software as a service (SaaS) in a disaggregated model – and many more providers to consider.

What’s become evident to me in recent weeks is that lots of software is still consumed in a traditional manner but as a hosted service. Take for example a financial services organisation who was ready to allow my customer access to their “private cloud” over a VPN from the virtual datacentre in Azure but then we hit a road block for routing the traffic. The Azure virtual datacentre is an extension of the customer’s network – using private IP addresses – but the service provider wanted to work with public IPs, which led to some extra routers being reployed (and some NATting of addresses somewhere along the way). Then along came another provider – with human resources applications accessed over unsecure HTTP (!). Not surprisingly, access across the Internet was not allowed and again we were relying on site-to-site VPNs to create a tunnel but the private IPs on our side were something the provider couldn’t cope with. More network wizardry was required.

I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to deal with this but my point is this: not all software consumed remotely is a cloud service. It may be licenced per user on a subscription model but if I can’t easily connect to the service from a client application (which will often be a browser) then it’s not really SaaS. And don’t get me started on the abuse of the term “private cloud”.

There’s a diagram I often use when talking to customers about different types of cloud deployments. it’s been around for years (and it’s not mine) but it’s based on the old NIST definitions.

One customer highlighted to me recently that there are probably some extra columns between on-premises and IaaS for hosted and co-lo services but neither of these are “cloud”. They are old IT – and not really much more than a different sort of “on-premises”.

Critically, the NIST description of SaaS reads:

“The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through either a thin client interface, such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email), or a program interface. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited userspecific application configuration settings.”

The sooner that hosted services are offered in a multi-tenant model that facilitates consumption on demand and broad network access the better. Until then, we’ll be stuck in a world of site-to-site VPNs and NATted IP addresses…