Cloud Solution Providers

** Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – CRM

SaaS is where software is hosted in the cloud, but appears on your device with full functionality.

Salesforce.com

Salesforce has turned into the go-to provider for SaaS CRM solutions, with Gartner stating the firm is dominating the market. With the arrival of Force.com, it’s pushed into the world of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to try and get other firms to build apps it can offer as part of its service, expanding its offering greatly.

Insightly

One for the SMBs, Insightly provides CRM SaaS that integrate with Google’s Gmail and Google Apps, as well as Outlook 2013 and Office 365.

The idea is to help customers track their dealings with potential customers, with its SaaS apps accessible from both iOS and Android.

** Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

IaaS cloud is probably the biggest one of them all. At its most basic, it’s companies offering virtual space for a price in which customers can host and develop services.

Amazon Web Services – AWS has cut prices ruthlessly in the face of competitors like Google and Microsoft.

Now it’s also jumped into the virtual desktop space with Amazon Workspaces, through which you can rent a virtual desktop running in AWS.

Microsoft Azure

Redmond’s IaaS cloud is a close rival to AWS, and boasts predictive analytics, private storage and disaster recovery services in its extensive wrapping.

** Storage

Cloud storage can handle all kinds of structured and unstructured data – from documents to pictures, from multiple sources.

One Drive for Business

Google Drive

Box

Dropbox Enterprise

** Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS)

DaaS is a cloud service where the back-end of a virtual desktop is hosted by a cloud provider.

Citrix

The virtualisation specialist is a big player in the DaaS space, aiming to go beyond a simple hosted workspace. It also provides hosted applications, secure mobile device management and secure file sync and share services.

VMware

Whether it’s spun off from EMC or not, VMware is the virtualisation player. VMware Horizon provides remote desktop capabilities to allow users to run typically Microsoft operating systems like XP, Vista or Windows 7 within a virtual environment hosted on a server somewhere.