How to Convince Your CEO About PaaS’ Benefits
Both small businesses and large companies have embraced the cloud, most realizing immediate improvements in their capabilities and bottom lines. In fact, IDC has gone on to predict an annual growth rate of 26% over the next five years – six times the growth predicted for other more ‘traditional’ IT.
PaaS Solutions
While most CEOs understand the SaaS model with ease, the same is not true for Platform as a Service. The term ‘platform’ itself may be poorly understood by the non-initiated, triggering doubts as to why PaaS is so important.
CEOs need hard facts to be sold on PaaS, and the ensuing case study may prove just the tonic.
Al Jazeera and the Egyptian Spring
In February 2011, Al Jazeera was at the forefront of reporting on the Egyptian uprising. As a result, the web traffic being handled by the channel’s Internet arm rose by 1000% (one thousand per cent!) With a traditional hosting service hopelessly unable to handle the traffic surge, Al Jazeera moved its site to a PaaS service. It thus obtained an elastic number of web-server platforms that grew and shrunk in response to traffic.
In allowing server numbers to increase with demand, PaaS eradicated Al Jazeera’s problems in responding to changes in traffic. The speed with which Al Jazeera gained this capability was astounding, achieved with no upfront expenditure and little (if any) additional manpower.
PaaS benefits that may appeal to CEOs include:
Using specialized platforms – Smart phone sales have already beaten PC sales and this gap will only widen. The cloud offers smart phone users native methods to stay connected on the move, bringing in new efficiencies to businesses. PaaS helps companies specifically aim soultions at the mobile user.
Cutting expenditure – Traditional IT expenditure relies on physical hardware, infrastructure and manpower. Fifty percent of all IT projects reportedly go well over budget, and a further 31% end up being canceled. In many cases maintenance can cost more than the original project itself. In PaaS projects, on the other hand, all hardware ends up in the cloud service provider’s premises.
Scalability and Growth – All PaaS solutions are scalable and elastic. Companies do not need to factor future needs into IT solutions because the size and number of your deployments can be programmed to grow automatically with load. There is no need to commit long-term to a particular company if you can get a better deal elsewhere.
When super storm Sandy was about to hit the East coast, many companies shifted their applications from data centers in the threatened area to elsewhere. Cloud computing companies assisted their users with this without even charging for technical assistance. The PaaS market is projected to grow from $512 million in 2012 to $1.7 billion by 2015. Companies that move in early can experiment and fine-tune their operations, ready for big dividends later on.
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About the Guest Author:
Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.
