Why PaaS Market is becoming a Big Deal in Cloud Computing

After several years of being the most popular tech trend, cloud computing adoption still grows at an amazing rate. Over the last several months, different studies have shown that the adoption of cloud computing solutions accelerates both in enterprise setting and in personal use. Following this popularity, cloud investments grow, while this market remains the most profitable area in tech industry.

Just like the Gartner’s research from February this year, the latest study carried out by 451 Research reports that Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is the fastest growing sector of cloud computing. According to their report, PaaS adoption rate accelerated over the last few years, with an increase of 41% from 2012. Together with the two other sectors, Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-service (SaaS), PaaS market is expected to reach $20B by the end of 2016, with PaaS only generating more than 24% of total cloud revenues.

Major Drivers

What is common to most of the companies adopting cloud technology is a desire for faster growth. PaaS enhances business processes in terms of efficiency, as it allows easy deployment, fast development and affordable maintenance. Major drivers of PaaS adoption are definitively related to the two trends listed below:

Mobile apps

Mobile apps are an important area of the cloud computing development and experts agree in prediction that mobile market is to reach its full potential over the next several years. Considering the growing BYOD trend in enterprise environment, as well as workload that increasingly require different types of mobile apps, private PaaS definitively has bright future in this respect.

Big Data analytics

Together with the growth of digital data generation, demand for powerful computing solutions increases in most business settings. Now even an average company has difficulties processing huge chunks of digital files known as big data, which is why a growing number of businesses decide to start using the cloud. PaaS represents a powerful computing platform that each company can implement without investing a lot into hardware equipment and this is the main reason cloud is so popular among startups and SMBs.

Potential problems

Despite all the benefits of outsourcing cloud platform, CIOs face particular challenges when it comes to its implementation. So far, the major problems have been related to security of data migration and ensuring maximum uptime. Emerging problems are those with managing the new form of IT infrastructure, primarily due to the fact that IT pros are used to different environments. While public cloud offers particular advantages in terms of scalability and computing power, private cloud architecture is a more static and a more secure platform.

To make the best out of the available resources, companies frequently decide to operate in hybrid cloud climate. Hybrid cloud is seen as the best solution for large companies that need to constantly scale computing resources, because it offers them cheap storage space on demand. On the other hand, all the most important data remains in house, meaning that CIOs don’t have to worry much about their security.

Regardless of the problems with its management, it is obvious that cloud is gradually becoming a new business norm. The task for contemporary managers is to consider the cloud’s potential and develop a strategy of adopting the most important software applications in order to ensure a fast growth of their business.