Your employer wants you to recommend a cloud service that will allow the IT department to deploy web applications without having to configure physical equipment or operating systems. What type of service is he talking about?
Answer Description
PaaS provide high level services like web and database servers without allowing access to the underlying operating system (Azure and Amazon web services are two examples of this). SaaS provides a software or application that is shared among all users (no dedicated server for your company, think Google Docs or Office 365). IaaS provides lower level services such as networking and a hypervisor, the OS would need to be installed and built up. (Azure, Amazon and many other providers exist for IaaS). iCloud is proprietary to Apple and is more of a filesharing/synchronization service.
Wikipedia
Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) or platform base service is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app. PaaS can be delivered in three ways:
as a public cloud service from a provider, where the consumer controls software deployment with minimal configuration …
Platform as a service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia