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A survey from analyst house Gartner has found key drivers for software as a service (SaaS) include redirection of in-house staff to other responsibilities, as well as quick deployment and faster access to innovation.
The research, which polled across 10 countries in May and June this year, found that respondents were still not fully satisfied by going all in to the cloud, instead opting for a mix of SaaS and on-premises.
Even though Gartner expects the traditional deployment model and usage for on-premises software is going to almost half from 34% now to 17% by 2017, issues such as data loss, data breaches, and unsecure APIs remain a problem, as well as privacy and the fear of government snooping. As a result, adoption of private cloud (46%) was cited more than public (24%). Public cloud isn’t always the best model for all use cases within companies, and CIOs appear to be aware of this.
“CIOs are focused on using the cloud to establish a modern, innovative IT environment with operational agility and business advantage as key outcomes, whereas business leaders still see the cloud as a means to save costs and may not yet have full appreciation for the business benefits or strategic opportunity of using cloud services,” Gartner explains.
Gartner also argues that SaaS and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors are looking at PaaS as a ‘natural extension for growth’. “Although SaaS and IaaS are fairly consolidated, PaaS is still open for expansion,” said research director Fabrizio Biscotti.
“Of all the cloud technological aspects for which respondents indicated investments, BPaaS (business process as a service), IaaS and SaaS are the most mature and established from a cloud landscape perspective, while PaaS is the least evolved,” he added.
Adam Gross, VP product for cloud developer platform Heroku, told CloudTech earlier this week that there is an “energy and excitement” concerning PaaS today, particularly with new agile technologies pervading the enterprise.
“Clearly a lot of what platform as a service is about is providing new levels of abstraction, and with that abstraction comes new kinds of simplicity,” he said. “People are really starting to understand that this is the new way applications are going to be built and delivered across the board.
Back in October, Gartner said cloud would underpin the majority of technology trends in 2015.