ePizza as a Service – Cloud Explained (OP, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS)

By Mark G. Walker, VP Advisory Services and Susan Kavanagh, Senior Advisor -iControl ESI

Introduction

We recently came across again this LinkedIn post from 2014 by Albert Barron, a software architect at IBM. His analogy does a great job of explaining the various “… as a service” models using everyone’s food favorite – PIZZA!!!. We are taking a few liberties with Albert’s original version and hope he doesn’t mind. 

Making Pizza

Figure 1 above assumes that your product is a Pizza and makes a comparison between three levels of Cloud services and an on premises model, to the pizza industry. Which model works best depends upon the organization and is almost always a cost vs. benefit analysis.

On-Premises - All you can eat

With the on-premises approach, you can make your pizza at home. You are responsible for purchasing all the ingredients including making the dough and sauce from scratch.

Explanation: To justify the cost of this approach, versus an outsourced approach, you will need a steady demand for pizza with great frequency, meaning someone is ordering pizza in large quantities every day. With this model, you will need a dedicated staff for everything and operate as though you are essentially running a pizza shop. 

This model is the equivalent of bringing all of your eDiscovery services in house, whether you are a law firm, corporation or other entity.

Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS)

With this model, you can buy some of the ingredients prepackaged (dough, sauce, toppings and cheese), but everything you need to cook the pizza (like the stone, oven, etc.) is rented from a vendor. In other words, you’re cooking a pizza using the providers ingredients in the providers kitchen.

Explanation: Like the on-premises model, you may need a significant demand for pizza, but maybe not in large volumes and not as frequently. Since what you need to cook the pizza is only rented – using only what you need – you can weather peaks and valleys in demand. If your cooking the pizza, of course, you must be able to justify the dedicated cooks required to do the work.

Think of this approach as an extension of internal practice support and IT teams. A hosting partner builds the infrastructure, configures systems and sets up data transfers, but the internal team will still manage most of the work.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) 

With this approach, the provider makes the Pizza using all their ingredients and equipment and delivers to your home.

Explanation: This model might benefit those that enjoy pizza delivered from a pizza shop but prefer to dine at home, rather than go out to a restaurant. 

Due to its limitations, Platform as a Service is not a widely-used model in eDiscovery.

Software as a Service (SaaS) 

With this model, you would go to a physical location, order your pizza and eat it at the restaurant.

Explanation: This is usually associated with those that don’t have a high demand for pizza. While that could be one justification, many are moving to SaaS models even when volume and demand are high, or one big event is calling for a large volume of pizza over a short period of time. 

This approach compares to eDiscovery clients who prefer to have all their data maintained by a centralized service provider. These providers host and manage a software solution, allowing user access to an application on-demand, over secure networks to work with their data.

Figure 2 above depicts how delivering a product in a data environment corresponds to the components of delivering a pizza. 

Conclusion

Which of the four models works best for your organization will depend on many factors. While cost vs. benefit is a consideration, efficiency is another component that should be reviewed when deciding on the best approach. There is every indication that most in the eDiscovery space that cannot justify on-premise models, are moving toward a SaaS based approach as opposed to IaaS models. 

Consider how much pizza you consume on a regular basis, then decide if it’s more cost effective and efficient to dine-in, carry-out or simply do-it-yourself.

Just a little tip: it’s always better with extra cheese!