Here's an example of cloud computing visualized. Saas, PaaS, and Iaas are all different cloud computing service models. SaaS stands for Software as a Service and it allows users to access applications via an Internet connection hosted by a vendor instead of installed locally. A member of the sales team accessing SmartDraw Cloud in their web browser to make a sales territory chart would be an example of someone using SaaS. PaaS stands for platform as a service and IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service. An example of IaaS would be Amazon EC2 or Rackspace offering access to virtual machines and files. PaaS more specifically offers an entire platform platform on which software can be developed and deployed like Google App Engine and Heroku.
