Partly Cloudy

A recent article in Forbes from contributor Joe McKendrick explores the results of a new study that finds when it comes to cloud management and budgeting for IT, confusion abounds. The 415 executives surveyed expressed great interest in cloud, but felt uncertainty about pricing options and how to best manage cloud platforms.

Our philosophy at Progress is that IT departments looking to adopt a private or public cloud should seek flexibility in terms of deployment and pricing. Challenges such as integrating on-premise or cloud data into an application quickly and deploying applications in a private cloud for security reasons can be addressed with the right platform.

The rapid application development pillar of the Progress Pacific Platform, Progress Rollbase, helps companies build apps that work in any environment, when it’s cloud, on-premise, in hybrid environments or a mobile device.

Having the flexibility to choose your deployment environment means flexibility in pricing. Public clouds are affordable for SMBs and non-profits, where as large enterprises have adequate resources to create a private cloud. Rollbase is offered as both a hosted service (Progress Rollbase Hosted Cloud) and a licensed product (Progress Rollbase Private Cloud) to give more pricing flexibility.

Selecting the right platform is the first step to success, but it’s important for organizations to remember that cloud is a complex IT system that needs proactive management in order to reap its benefits. Want to try Rollbase and see for yourself? Sign up for a free trial here. You can also learn more about using cloud for application development in my recent blog post, “5 Reasons PaaS is Picking Up.”