SaaS, IaaS or PaaS: Picking the Right Strategy

Cloud based application development requires a comprehensive XaaS strategy.

Odds are you’ve already begun to build cloud into your app dev process. Whether you’re still on the fence or have already made major steps in that direction, to be successful with cloud, you must have a comprehensive XaaS strategy that considers all the requirements from across the entire supply chain. That, in turn, will help you determine the best service approach.

Infrastructure Requirements for Cloud Based Application Development

Let’s start at the infrastructure layer. It’s important to think about all of your app dev requirements. For example:

• Compute, storage (block and object) and database services (relational, NoSQL, more)
• Operating system and bandwidth (incoming and outgoing requests) considerations
• Regional support
• SLAs—uptime for compute and storage
• Load balancing and auto-scaling support
• Alignment with your hybrid or private “burst to the public cloud” strategy
• Alignment with OpenStack or other preferred architectures
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, pricing

Selecting SaaS

On the opposite end of the scale is Software as a Service (SaaS). While there are technical and business considerations, the business team will likely dominate your SaaS application selections, and they will likely take the lead in application selection. While you may influence the decision, if your approach is too heavy handed, you risk alienating the users you are trying to support. Like it or not, you’ll probably be stuck integrating and governing the application—so it’s wise to focus your efforts here.

PaaS May Be the Most Important Decision You Make For Your Organization

I’m likely biased, but I think your Platform as a Service (PaaS) decision is the most interesting. Given the need to leverage applications for competitive differentiation, it’s the most important to your organization. So, let’s look at the PaaS decision more closely.

PaaS provides multiple business and IT benefits including the ability to delegate infrastructure and platform management to specialists while concentrating on their core competency of developing applications. Likewise, PaaS can reduce IT overhead and capital expense by eliminating physical hardware and space requirements—not to mention many time-consuming maintenance tasks.

Discover How PaaS Can Transform Your Application Development Organization

For more on creating a high productivity application development environment using PaaS, download my latest whitepaper, “9 Essentials to Create Amazing Applications Faster.”