siliconindia | | May 20179The simplicity of implementation creates a lack of flexibility which many of the customers demand owing to variation in operating modelsA more conservative and traditional approach which is also effective and successful is the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In 2016, spending on public cloud Infra-structure as a Service hardware and software is forecast to reach 38B USD, growing to 173B USD in 2026. This model works for companies of all scales and sizes. The infrastructure is shared through virtualization of servers and memory in a way to optimize the capacity and capa-bilities of the machines. The businesses get access to the server through Virtual Machines where owners have the flexibility to manage them in any way they want. They may choose to manage the software life cycle themselves or have the software provider manage the same for them. Today if you want to setup a small business and get a website along with some software application deploy-ment, you can arrange for a system to do so within a mat-ter of minutes by providing your server, space require-ments and data traffic. The payment is as easy as swiping a credit card post which the tools generate a VM with your choice of OS and server requirements.Enterprise Software providers are providing their ap-plications through IaaS in a fully managed environment which is secure and provides faster innovation cycles. Big businesses and manufacturing units who have very specific requirements prefer this approach because it gives the flex-ibility to enhance or deploy completely new applications with ease in a virtualized environment. IaaS is the precur-sor for huge ERP implementations to move into the SaaS space giving them the strengths of a self-owned server en-vironment along with the benefits of not having to manage physical machines.The newest and the most exciting from a technolo-gy standpoint is the Platform as a Service (PaaS) model. PaaS allows businesses to develop their own services and apps on top of tools and infrastructure provided by the platform provider. PaaS platforms have given business-es the ownership of innovation in their own premises by handing over the technology to their developers. The busi-nesses are exposed only to relevant toolkits which helps them to develop, enhance and deploy the application for their environment hiding away the complexity of lifecycle management and infrastructure. This model is more suit-ed to the newer technology centric developments which need faster innovation cycles with focus on very specific areas. Internet of Things (IoT) is a great example of inno-vation being developed on platforms where cloud services help machines connect to backend systems. Since every business has a different requirement with respect to ma-chine connectivity, it makes absolute sense to invest into a PaaS system which helps businesses innovate faster. It is expected that by 2020, over 50 percent of all new appli-cations developed on PaaS will be IoT-centric, disrupting conventional architecture practices.PaaS systems have made it possible to extend the yes-ter year model of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) into micro service based architecture. It is expected that smaller micro services will be hosted on distributed cloud systems in future to cater to technical as well as business requirements. A major advantage in granulizing services is that it gives application developers the strength to pro-gram applications on a platform of their choice with plug-ins to distributed systems which increases the develop-ment speed and enables them to compartmentalize their efforts into their area of interest.Since there are multiple options available and though the systems can be complex, there is a clear value prop-osition for each of the model. Cloud systems are evolv-ing fast and we expect more service/ subscription models coming up in the near future. Hybrid implementations which will be a combination of On Premise, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS will continue for some time to come, but one thing is for sure- Business is at the center of this cloud revolution and will continue to benefit through it.
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