How Does It Feel to Be on the Cutting Edge?
Taking the leap into the cloud can be a challenge for nonprofit organizations. Your coworkers are concerned about learning a new system, the board is either pushing the change with both hands or dragging their feet, you’re feeling the pressure that the move to the new system must be successful and worthwhile. There’s a lot of risk, but, the potential for a lot of reward.
The good news is cloud computing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, cloud computing will continue to massively impact technology in 2013. Check out the article posted by BetaNews, a well regarded technology news site, ‘10 predictions how cloud computing will transform traditional IT in 2013’.
The gist is, we’re all heading into the cloud and it’s only going to get better. Your move onto the Salesforce platform is leaps and bounds ahead of where many nonprofits are now. In fact, the federal government and the health care industry are trying to catch up with you. Welcome to the cutting edge!
To help contextualize the article, we’ve defined a few terms below.
SaaS: Software as a Service – Salesforce.com is a SaaS solution. Software as a Service implies that rather than purchasing the program or software you want (previously installed physically on onsite servers, CDs with downloadable programs, etc.) you’re renting access to particular software that is hosted and maintained elsewhere.
PaaS: Platform as a Service – Force.com (the underlying code architecture of Salesforce) is a PaaS because it has an open API, meaning people can access the platform’s code to build new applications, without having to invent a new code language, operating system, database, etc. They rent access to the platform to build whatever shiny new application (donation processing app, Facebook integration app, peer-to-peer fundraising app, etc.).
IaaS: Infastructure as a Service – Infrastructure means hardware or physical objects that enable technology– computers, phones, servers. However, it’s now more common that the service is supporting virtual machines and resources.
Well, that’s it in a nutshell. Hope you are feeling as good about being part of the cloud as we are!
