IT Glossary: You should know these IT terms!

What was CRM again? How does SaaS work? IT terminology drives sweat beads to many people’s foreheads. Has it been heard somehow, somewhere and sometime by everyone, but really understood? We explain the most important IT terms.

DaaS

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a cloud service where the backend of a virtual desktop infrastructure is hosted by a cloud service provider. DaaS has a multi-tenancy architecture. In a DaaS deployment model, the service provider is responsible for managing the back-end. This includes storage for data, backup, security and upgrades. Typically, the customer’s personal information is copied to or from the virtual desktop during login or logout.

CRM

Stands for Customer Relationship Management. In the simplest case, a CRM system enables companies to manage business relationships and the associated data and information. With CRM, you can store contact information, accounts, leads and opportunities for customers and prospects in a central location, ideally in the cloud, so that information is accessible to many in real time.

SaaS

SaaS or Software as a Service is any cloud service where consumers can access software applications over the Internet. The applications are hosted in the “cloud” and can be used for a variety of tasks for both individuals and organizations.

IaaS

As with all cloud computing services, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides access to computing resources in a virtualized environment, the “cloud”, via a public connection, typically the Internet. IaaS is one of the three basic service models of cloud computing alongside Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Amazon AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a collection of remote computing services called Web Services, is a cloud computing platform offered by Amazon.com. These services are offered from 11 geographic regions around the world. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon S3 are among the most central and well-known of these services. Amazon markets these products as a service to deliver great computing power faster and more cost-effectively than a client company building a physical server farm.

Identity Management

Identity management is a term that largely refers to the management of individual identities within a system, such as a company, a network or even a country. In enterprise IT, identity management is about defining and managing the roles and access rights of individual network users.

Source image: iStock/ pinstock