

'As a service' refers to the way IT assets are consumed in these offerings - and to the essential difference between cloud computing and traditional IT. Many mid-sized businesses use more than one, and most large enterprises use all three. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are not mutually exclusive.

IaaS, or infrastructure as a service, is on-demand access to cloud-hosted physical and virtual servers, storage and networking - the backend IT infrastructure for running applications and workloads in the cloud.They are sometimes referred to as cloud service models or cloud computing service models. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are the three most popular types of cloud service offerings.
