The Cloud continues to hang over the business computing landscape like, well, a cloud. Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS—all of it makes for a confusing alphabet soup for even the most experienced industry observers and IT pros.

And, as longstanding technology firms look for ways to get into the market and new entrants emerge, creating new terminology, claiming firsts and generally obfuscating the entire landscape, it only promises to get more confusing for technology buyers seeking a cost effective, scalable and agile solution for their needs. This paper serves to provide some clarity around the different flavors of cloud and a detailed explanation of why multi-tenant SaaS offers the greatest combination of value, agility and scalability.