Cloud Services: My Thoughts (Part 3)

This is part of my Individual project, I am supposed to inform someone about IDaaS and SaaS by doing some research on a couple of providers and comparing them back and forth.  But I am not entirely sure that I truly understand how IDaaS is supposed to work, let me know if I am on the right track, please.

Software as a Service (SaaS) and Identity as a Service (IDaaS) Plan

There are quite a few IDaaS hosts that are very popular, and there are even a few that didn’t even start as a IDaaS host.  There seems to be two different types of IDaaS, one that houses all sorts of authentication along with the identification of users and then there is IDaaS where the Host just identifies the user and allows sites to link security to the identification.  The latter is one I am more familiar with, there are a lot of sites that allow the user to log in using their ID from other prominent sites, and you might be familiar with some of the sites that give access to the API to authenticate the user through the host site.  If you have ever used Facebook or Twitter or Google to log into another site so that you don’t have to remember another username and password combination then you have used a version of IDaaS in its most basic form.  The ID doesn’t necessarily have any permissions or authentication tied to it, but once the host has verified the user’s identity the user can use this “Key” to unlock many websites and also a base to keep track of permissions.  Most identity is usually linked to an Active Directory type server where the identity is only part of the authentication process, the other part is roles and permissions for different applications.  One of the best parts of having the use of IDaaS is that they will give you a nice and neat API for identifying the user and then leave it up to you to attach the role and permissions to the user after the user has been identified.  What is really nice is that once you have an Identity that is cloud based it can be used to grant users access or track the user’s access to applications fairly easily.  Let’s say that I have an identity through Microsoft, like for my personal Email among other things, I can be hired by a company and they can add my Microsoft ID to their systems so that I can access their applications, whatever they may be.  Along with accessing their applications they can furnish me with access to cloud applications that they have either developed or even give me access to their servers that are in the cloud so that I can administer them.  Now I have an Identity and the person in charge of Software can add me to the list of users that needs an Office 365 license through the company, I already have an Identity so it makes it really easy for the admin.  Google also has a lot of nice freebie Software that is completely based in the cloud, you don’t have to download any software or install any software on your machine.  Another great advantage of using google cloud apps is that because these apps are almost completely cloud based you can use the applications on any machine with only operating system.

The biggest risk with Google Docs is that all your stuff is on the internet and if for some reason security is compromised all the documents that you have stored on the cloud could be in danger of being stolen. 

The biggest disadvantage of Google Docs is that if you lose internet connection you won’t have access to the applications, but they are free.  Office 365 is nice because the application is actually installed on your machine so there is no outage if you lose internet connection, but the drawback of having the applications installed is that they have to be specifically engineered for specific operating systems.  Microsoft has been working to get their office applications to work on other operating systems which will be super nice.

Moving Documents to either one of these cloud platforms wouldn’t be hard because they both handle the same document type.  Microsoft Office 365 will be much easier to migrate to because there really isn’t anything to migrate because a lot of companies have been using Microsoft products already.  Migrating to Google Cloud Storage will take some migration, but if you are storing the documents locally then you really don’t need to worry about migration here either, but if you do then you have the documents anywhere that you have internet access.

Things don't always copy paste from Word nicely do they?