n case you haven’t heard, the cloud is like pizza. You can have pizza four different ways – at home, via take and bake, delivery, or dining out at a restaurant.

Similarly, there are three different services models when it comes to cloud computing – IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS – and three different cloud types – public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud. With each different kind of pizza experience, the diner handles a certain fraction of the process, and a third party handles a certain fraction of the process.

Going along with this comparison, the same can be said for the various combinations of service models and cloud types listed above. (Below is an image that makes a bit more sense of this).

As enterprise IT professionals plan whether or not to move to the cloud, they are overwhelmed by all of these different combinations. Many find themselves asking, “Should we really migrate to the cloud?” And more often than not, the answer is, “It depends.”

It depends on the sustainability of the workload for a cloud environment, on the level of security a provider can promise, or whether or not an organization thinks they’re more reliable than the cloud provider in question.