A company wants to migrate to the cloud to reduce operational costs.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) gives the customer control of the deployed applications and their data while the provider manages the underlying platform, including compute, storage, networking, virtualization, operating system, runtime, and middleware. This division lets the company modify and patch its own application code without carrying the operational burden of the lower infrastructure layers. In IaaS, the customer must also administer the guest operating system, middleware, and runtime, which violates the requirement that the provider manage everything except the applications. SaaS provides a complete provider-managed application and therefore does not permit the required application-level control. “Hybrid cloud” describes a deployment architecture combining environments, not a service-responsibility model. PaaS is therefore the correct balance of application control and reduced operational responsibility. Cisco PaaS architecture guidance