A parks department adopts email and collaboration as a complete vendor-hosted application with no infrastructure to manage. A board member labels the purchase Infrastructure as a Service. Which service model is actually in use?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Calling a finished mailbox suite IaaS is like calling a restaurant meal a kitchen lease. When parks just logs in and uses email with no servers to babysit, that is SaaS. IaaS would mean they still cook on rented stoves they manage themselves.
Full Explanation
Software as a Service delivers a complete, provider-operated application that customers consume through a client interface without managing underlying infrastructure. Email and collaboration suites typically exemplify SaaS, whereas IaaS supplies infrastructure the customer still administers and PaaS supplies a managed runtime for customer-deployed code. Mislabeling SaaS as IaaS obscures shared-responsibility and operational expectations.