IAAS, PAAS, SAAS… What’s Next ?
Cloud industry’s demand has been increased in the last few years and its growing exponentially. With the rising demand, cloud service providers are also working so hard to expand their market by providing different type of services to clients as per their requirements.
Initially when cloud solutions started, It was limited to 3 types.
- Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IAAS)
- Platform-As-A-Service(SAAS)
- Software-As-A-Service(SAAS)
Along with the above categories service providers offer customized services to clients such as containers (CaaS), serverless computing (FaaS), storage, edge computing, private cloud, and AI/ML platforms.
Gartner forecasts end-user spending on public cloud services to reach $396 billion in 2021 and grow 21.7% to reach $482 billion in 2022. Additionally, by 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, up from less than 17% in 2021.
Among the 3-models, Software as a service (SaaS) models are becoming the go-to for many organizations for a variety of reasons, including flexibility, comfortability and affordability. SaaS solutions are among the fastest-growing segments in the IT industry.
Four new trends in cloud computing are continuing to expand the breadth of cloud offerings and capabilities, accelerating growth across all segments in the public cloud services market, according to Gartner, Inc. The four trends are: cloud ubiquity, regional cloud ecosystems, sustainability and carbon-intelligent cloud, and cloud infrastructure and platform service (CIPS) providers’ automated programmable infrastructure.
Gartner estimates that SaaS will continue to maintain this dominance well into 2022:
New-Age Service Models
With the pandemic and sudden paradigm shift of working remotely and organizations working to migrate from on-premises infrastructure to cloud infrastructure based on their requirements also demanded for new service models at affordable plans for all types of businesses. Moreover, this remote method as opened doors for many new business opportunities and emerging technological trends.
Cloud service providers understood this demand and started offering additional services.
- Security-As-A-Service(SAAS)
Data breaches and user privacy have been the major concerns during the pandemic and due to the change in business operations, companies are figuring out the ways to secure the remote working model. Here the security solution providing firms came with the solution of offering their services from cloud by security the companies globally with their SAAS model. Many companies like Crowdstrike, Zscalar, Cisco has developed their cloud security solutions for End-User, Network, Web, Perimeter level security.
2. AI/ML-As-A-Service
AI/ML are the next-gen technologies which require high computation power to process large amounts of data to provide accurate results. Cloud service providers understood the demand and setup the datacenters to meet the requirements of the clients to offer this service.
3. Blockchain-As-A-Service
Blockchain is also one of the Next-Gen technology which works with the decentralization protocol as the primary use case. But, when companies understood the capability of blockchain and the models, cloud service providers came with the service offering for processing the transactions, validations and other blockchain related activities.
4. Banking-As-A-Service
Fintech companies are one of the successful and growing trend in 2021. Global financial sector was highly affected due to the pandemic and the bounce back was the innovative bunch of fintech startups came up with the idea of providing various type of financial services to users digitally to avoid physical interactions etc. Neo Banking and digital payments are best examples for them. Cloud service providers offered customized services to Fintech companies to operate their business securely and effectively with this model.
5. Crypto-As-A-Service
Cryptocurrency is the buzzing word across the globe. We are hearing so many things about the cryptocurrency and the underlying technology. To handle and process such a new and complex technology we need to have high computation power from a high end hardware equipment. Cryptocurrency requires mining, developing, processing, validation and availability. Additionally, many companies started partnering with the crypto exchanges to provide crypto services to the individuals. So, Instead of upgrading their Infrastructure and making it difficult to manage additional resources, companies are preferring towards this service model where the underlying technologies, workflows, compliance remains same and hardware, computation resources will be provided by the cloud as per the geo location.
6. Streaming/Gaming-As-A-Service
We like to get inspiration to build a skill from people who are master at it and we follow them to learn from them. Thanks to pandemic and advanced internet which gave to new rise of monetization method using streaming/gaming. Streaming is a process of sharing the screen to the audience and share our activities which might be gaming, reading, researching and many more. Streaming was already been in the market by the companies like Netflix, Steam, Nitro but twitch, discord and other platforms has taken this to next level and the market share for this segment has been increased a lot and its still growing. Using cloud infra it will be feasible to provide efficient service to the users and also run the business without any disruptions.
Challenges:
Cloud business is booming and exponentially growing but there are some challenges which we need to take into consideration and plan accordingly.
- Outages are biggest challenges to the businesses as the sudden disruptions give a huge blow to the company in terms of reputation and financial losses
- Security breaches are a matter of concerns. Since more companies are adapting to cloud infra and there is a high risk if any data breach occurs as some companies use co-location DC and all the companies might get affected.
- Preparing a proper plan for incident response, Business continuity and disaster recovery to keep the business running without any outages.
There is a long way for the cloud industry to grow and we can experience the next internet revolution in the future.
Thanks for taking your time to read this. :)
