Murray also said that he sees “more and more” opportunities for DR and/or back-up to the cloud within the Irish marketplace. “Our offices in the US and Japan are also experiencing an uptick in demand for back-up and DR services as well,” said Murray. While from a Salesforce perspective, Dempsey said that they have seen “more customers, in Ireland, and internationally, looking to base their next generation of customer engagement and experience,” on the company’s cloud platforms. While in addition to that, the Salesforce1 mobile app is also proving to be a popular service with clients, allowing the option to “run” a business from a smart phone.
Cloud service providers have a duty to ensure they carefully choose who to partner with in the data centre space. They’re selling not just their platform but a sustainable solution for perhaps a decade, Garry Keogh, Digital Realty
All of these services, of course, rely on a robust hub from which to operate. With this in mind, Gary Keogh, sales director of co-location and data centre business Digital Realty, said that cloud service providers have a duty to ensure they “carefully choose” who to partner with in the data centre space. “They’re selling not just their platform but a sustainable solution for perhaps a decade,” said Keogh.
Clients are, he said, “looking for 100% availability from a power perspective, and efficiency of operations.” In turn, sustainable environmental performance of the data centre and the inherent savings involved in that, should see cloud services providers being able to pass savings on to their clients.
The data centre decision shouldn’t, he said, “be a leap of faith” either. “If you have a start-up cloud provider operating on a very thin wire who doesn’t inform the client on how they’re managing information and data it can’t give the customer confidence or the provider credibility.”
Most of the growth in PaaS has been, and I suspect will continue to be, part of an IaaS solution. The changes in containerisation will allow IaaS providers to offer PaaS solutions more simply, safely and less expensively. This will help to combat some of the common resistance to PaaS, such as the fear of lock in or concerns about data breaches, Gerry Murray, Xterity Cloud Services
Freeing up resources
Moving back to containerisation though, where does it move over the coming 12 months? Savenet Solutions CTO Cunningham said that Docker will continue to be “the main player to keep an eye on” as they make it a simpler process for enterprises to start using the service. Cunningham added too that cloud back-up has been in the small to medium-sized enterprise space for “a decade now” but the enterprise market is, he said, starting to see the benefits of outsourcing back-ups. It means, said Cunningham, “freeing up internal IT resources to add value to the business instead of checking back-up logs and restoring five year old emails.”
Likewise too, he said that disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is moving in to the enterprise space as the cost of maintaining two separate infrastructures and two locations is becoming “too high and time consuming to do it right.” While in addition to this, Cunningham saw cloud archiving-as-a-service becoming a “big winner in the coming years” to help reduce the costs of primary storage, cloud back-ups and disaster recovery storage.
Looking ahead to where else cloud services spend will sit over the next year or two, ShoreTel’s Bradshaw said that one of the most exciting opportunities for businesses to look out for “is the ability to use PaaS to build bespoke applications, flexible working structures, and processes that facilitate the business process.”
Noting that there are a number of industries relying upon “antiquated software on platforms that lack flexibility and are slow and expensive to operate,” Bradshaw commented that until recently “it has been too expensive to migrate to other platforms due to the high degree of customisation required.” However there are a number of vendors such as Google enabling businesses to write and create their own application environments and run them as a service via PaaS, said Bradshaw.
Weighing up the cloud services landscape of the near future, Xterity’s Murray was another who felt that as SaaS has continued to grow and gain market share around business apps like CRM, email and collaboration, cloud providers “that can help aggregate services with their back-end cloud projects in the IaaS and PaaS space will gain significant traction.” Murray said too that there will continue to be many “specialised clouds and lots of SaaS solutions available, however, in the end we cannot forget that what really drives IT decisions is the application. Which, ultimately, is why individuals in this space will be more interested in cloud providers that make it easy to work with the SaaS apps they already have or want.”
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