Microsoft plans to give customers the option of running Office Web on their own servers, according to InformationWeek.

This would be a powerful way for large enterprises to get around the data ownership issues in cloud computing, especially SaaS-type offerings. But it misses out on many of the benefits of cloud computing.

A hybrid system — let’s call it “Computer as a Service” (CaaS) — could deliver the benefits of cloud computing while mitigating data ownership issues.

CaaS

With CaaS, the “service” part delivers my (virtual) corporate servers, and I pick and choose CaaS-compatible applications to put on those corporate servers. Those CaaS-compatible apps should be auto-installing, self-updating and self-managing.

With this approach I could reap many of the benefits of cloud computing, including:

• compliance best practices — experts handle security, backups, etc.
• no capital outlay
• much less support cost, fewer IT hires
• instant scalability

The service part of this approach could be simply my corporate Amazon Web Services account. A CaaS-compatible app that I buy could install itself on EC2 instances in my account, use S3 for storage and CloudFront for content delivery, etc.

Owned Cloud

I get cloud computing, but I own my data, albeit on Amazon’s servers. And I’ve eliminated SaaS-type dependency because I have the app and my AWS instances in my control, unlike a SaaS offering which may change or even disappear before I’m ready to change.