Cloud Computing Outlook Weekly Brief
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Breakthroughs achieved in internet technology significantly boosted the internet speed, thereby setting the ball in motion for the availability of enterprise-grade business software as a service. While opinions vary about the inception of software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, most tend to credit Salesforce for heralding the era of modern-day cloud computing. The SaaS model proved to be a milestone development with enterprises extending the concept to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and the trend has since then, continued. Today, a large number of companies ranging from enterprises to startups are jumping into the SaaS bandwagon to offer their products through the cloud.
Gartner estimates the global markets for SaaS, PaaS and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to register impressive growth rates by the end of 2017 and the trend is expected to continue in the following year. A prime reason attributed for the unprecedented growth in cloud model is the shift from the capital expenditure to operating expenditure, which significantly lowers the total cost of ownership of the product. Faster implementation and scalable access to the latest technological updates for businesses of all sizes, emerge as game changers in favor of the ‘as-a-service’ models.
The ‘as-a-service’ models are however not without their share of concerns. For example, service outages, security, hidden costs such as those associated with special integration services offered to clients, and other issues pertaining to governance and concern, continue to remain. The lack of adequate transparency into product support and customer service or even service provider lock-ins, are some of the major potential downsides to cloud deployment models. These problems could be tackled by means of service level agreements that guarantee protection to the end-users. However, vigilance on the part of enterprises to insulate themselves from service outages turns out to be a business imperative.
