Your IT Team Knows These Three Cloud Models. You Should Too.

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Private Advisory for Boards and CFOs: https://www.jhstrategicit.com/

IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are not just technical categories. They are responsibility allocations. Every cloud model your organization runs determines how cost behaves, how much your IT team controls, and who is accountable when something goes wrong. Most executives approve these decisions without understanding where the liability actually lands.

Each model carries a hidden financial trap. IaaS runs a billing meter that nobody watches until the invoice arrives. PaaS embeds vendor dependency so deeply that exit cost exceeds renewal cost at negotiation time. SaaS cost leakage is rarely about unused licenses — it is about tier over-entitlement, where users are provisioned to enterprise-level access they do not need because it was easier than doing a proper needs analysis on day one.

Every major cloud provider publishes a document that makes the accountability boundary explicit. It is called the Shared Responsibility Model. In IaaS, almost everything above the physical hardware is yours. In SaaS, the vendor owns the application, the infrastructure, and the security of the platform. The model you approve determines whether your team is handing an auditor the vendor's compliance report or handing them your own logs.

Read the Shared Responsibility Model before your next cloud approval: https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cloud-security/shared-responsibility/

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