Australia's journey to PaaS

Cloud is growing exponentially, owing to a significant shift towards online and cloud platforms, as well as an increase in hybrid working, 5G technology, the metaverse and increased digital transformation.

Gartner research expects Australian companies to increase public cloud spending to $18.7 billion — a 17.6% increase on 2022 — which is causing many startups and small and large businesses to turn to cloud solutions to help scale up their presence. What is the cloud’s projected evolution, you ask? The whole market is moving to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions.

Breaking down PaaS

PaaS is one of three types of cloud computing services along with infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service. It refers to a platform that a cloud provider offers users via the network, hence, platform-as-a-service. This platform is hosted by the provider, within their infrastructure. The user logs in to the platform via the cloud provider control panel or an API.

PaaS solutions provide a ready-to-use platform on which you can install, configure and run your own applications. The provider manages the hardware, virtualisation layer and operating system. This enables companies and developers to realise the cloud’s broader benefits like scalability, including rapid allocation and deallocation of resources with a pay-as-you-use model, enhanced security and reliability, and enables the sharing of resources across multiple development teams, avoiding the need for excessive allocation of multiple assets of the same type in separate silos.

There are many reasons PaaS models can be advantageous for companies. They can provide their teams, especially developers and programmers, with a platform to help them with their daily work — and they do not need to maintain the platform — the cloud service provider takes care of that by maintaining the physical infrastructure on which the platform is hosted. This means that businesses do not need to invest in local servers or train maintenance teams to use their tools.

Addressing transformation challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on businesses, suppressing profitability and diminishing cash flow and financial reserves. As a result, PaaS solutions have been designed to help teams learn to foster collaboration. Many businesses across multiple verticals have adopted the work-from-home model to maintain employee wellbeing and operational efficiency, driving demand for PaaS-based solutions.

With many businesses investing in big data, IoT, artificial intelligence and 5G technologies to gain a competitive edge, and generate significant business insights for decision-making, PaaS solutions address challenges associated with the shift. The growing demand for analytics and big data technologies in cloud computing services is creating numerous new opportunities for businesses. In a digital economy, your applications are the product you market, or your production tool.

To stay competitive, you must create, maintain, enhance and scale your applications within your business constraints. To support these disruptive technologies, businesses must be equipped to support them. PaaS services technological advancements, such as AI capabilities as an example, enabling businesses to take advantage of these opportunities.

Why migrate to PaaS?

If you already have a platform, cloud migration is a natural progression. When you have an infrastructure to run your platform on, maintaining it costs time and money. If you migrate to PaaS, infrastructure maintenance will be a problem of the past — you can then focus on your applications and business data. Doing so will boost your responsiveness to customer requests and give you a competitive edge. If you need to add more resources, you can do so quickly with a cloud infrastructure, in contrast to on-premises environments. Furthermore, a provider can offer optimal security, particularly through compliance protocols for your data — GDPR compliance, HDS and others — and protections like anti-DDoS.

More than ever, businesses need to access and unlock the full potential of the cloud. Its ability to provide IT resources on demand, scalable infrastructure and a pay-per-use offering approach makes PaaS solutions a no-brainer, particularly for startups, small businesses and scale-ups.

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