Read through Water Briefing’s list of tenders (yes, of course we do) and you will notice something interesting.
It contains some unfamiliar acronyms: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. PaaS doesn’t stand for Pizza as a Service, but it’s used as a fantastic analogy as part of a nice primer from Hosting Advice that explains the acronyms with the help of some clear diagrams.
The main point is that water companies are moving away from everything On-Premise. They are realising that they don’t need to own and run data centres and develop software. There are other companies for whom these things are core competencies, which they leverage across much larger client bases. It is fundamentally inefficient to run these to serve a single business, and it is a distraction from what the business should be focused on.
That said, there are still parts of the world that are on the journey to this conclusion, and in some cases a long way off it. Their thinking is driven mainly by a desire for control, and a belief that what is within one’s physical premise is under one’s control, and that that is better.
i2O offers on-premise solutions, but recommends cloud-based solutions.