Pizza as a Service

In my job I spend a lot of time dealing with people that are not IT.  Most of the stakeholders are military war fighters.  That's their forte and I'm thankful that there are people that can and do that job.  They come to my command with a good basis of IT skills usually as well as a good understanding of how our exercises run and the direction they need to be taken.  Eventually the topics start to run deeper into more IT-centric stuff.  Especially now as we are trying to move the legacy software packages to..  wait for it...  THE CLOUD!  Oh yes, that wonderful buzz word!  We would like to move as many of our applications to THE CLOUD because the vast majority of our exercises span multiple sites (and even countries).  In the discussions we always end up talking about PaaS, or Iaas, or Saas (or actually MSaaS which is Modeling and Simulation as a Service).  It can get a little confusing.  I've used this graphic recently to try and clear things up.

[source] Albert Barron via LinkedIN

It really is a great explanation of what the differences are.

The other issue I have, again with THE CLOUD is getting some of my leadership to understand that it's somewhat a subjective term.  We can, and somewhat, have a cloud in the building.  Moving to THE CLOUD does not always means moving things off-site.  Just defining it better, or explaining it better, has started to help.  Talk about an over used, not greatly understood term..