In recent years, a bewildering array of acronyms about X-as-a-Service has sprung up. Cloud computing has made it possible for an increasingly wide range of services to be provided over the Internet instead of on premise, with all the advantages that confers. But sorting through the various X-as-a-Service options can be confusing, especially since many capabilities are available as more than one option.

A good example is video. Video is increasingly a part of the way we do business today, as we all become more used to communicating, collaborating, learning, and entertaining ourselves through video. While it has been a crucial part of use cases like marketing for a long time, video is now popping up in workflows all over the place — as software instructions, job interviews, note-taking for meetings, ways of encouraging a sense of community for far-flung teams, call monitoring, and more — pretty much anything that can be imagined. As such, companies are under increasing pressure to include video in their enterprises and products.

So how can an organization ‘video-fy’ itself? There are a number of cloud-based options available today.

Software-as-a-Service

This is the biggest cloud market at the moment, and it’s not done growing. SaaS lets an organization deploy third-party applications through a web browser, eliminating the need to download or install software onsite. That reduces the requirements on the organization for support, storage, and maintenance, so the developers need never again worry about those tasks thanks to the SaaS vendor of choice.

A corporate video portal is a good example here: the SaaS provider takes care of everything video-related, including all the underlying technology, the user experience and the user interface. Often, developers on the customer side are not needed at all. All the user needs to do is start using the product. SaaS offers a one-stop solution for a company who wants an out-of-the-box way to use video.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service

IaaS exists for organizations who don’t want an application, they just want remote access to datacenter infrastructures. They want to build their own capabilities and just need the power of the cloud to scale up computational power, storage, and networking. Here, companies are responsible for managing their own applications and data; the provider manages servers and storage.

A company with its own streaming service, powered by a vendor like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, is a good example of IaaS for video. The company licenses, deploys and manages the software to do transcoding, file management and delivery in house, and does everything video-related themselves. Both DevOps teams and developers are required to deploy and maintain this solution, bringing in needed developer resources as the solution is scaled up.

Platform-as-a-Service

PaaS is roughly halfway between SaaS and IaaS — neither a complete solution nor bare-metal power. Instead, it provides a platform that can be used to build more sophisticated systems. It offers far more flexibility and control than SaaS, but significantly more support than IaaS.

The biggest advantage with PaaS is that it offers developers a shortcut to creating their own offerings, with modular APIs and SDKs that significantly reduce the amount of time and effort necessary for coding and ongoing maintenance.

For those wishing to quickly create their own video experiences and workflows, Video Platform as a Service, or VPaaS, is ideal. It offers a scalable platform, developer tools, robust APIs, client libraries, and mobile SDKs.

VPaaS enables developers to easily integrate video workflows and experiences into any application, and leverage robust tools to create new video-rich applications and services enabling the complex handling of video assets. VPaaS also introduces unique advantages. API-centric architecture includes granular microservices as the interface to control every atomic platform capability. Multi-tenancy offers supreme white-labeling flexibility. Extreme backward compatibility ensures integrated apps and workflows never break, while allowing simple upgrades and optimizations to adhere to new standards to ensure future-proofing. Finally, by focusing on developer experience with video, VPaaS makes it easy to setup, learn, extend, share, and code best practices across industries and use-cases.

By using VPaaS, developers can quickly incorporate capabilities like media ingestion, management, transcoding, delivery, playback, enrichment, and monetization into their own workflows. This enables them to add video to any experience or use case.

As the market increasingly demands offerings to include video as a native data type, specialized cloud services are becoming a critical part of organizations’ content and product strategies. Video is an incredibly powerful tool, offering a highly personal and engaging way to communicate. It’s also a demanding data type to work with, complex and bandwidth-intensive. Choosing the right cloud strategy is the key to successfully adding video to any workflow.