2021 is the year of the extended breakout where most organizations will adopt a full stack of PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS in some fashion for their business.  The pandemic forced companies to think quickly on their feet and implement a remote SDWAN, Unified Communications and a Multi-Cloud posture to support employees and customers.  Where are organizations expanding PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS?  Several areas will have extensive investments by companies looking to broaden and support workloads globally.   Those who are slow to adopt could find themselves with outdated tech debt.

 

SaaS is one of the fastest growing markets due to the ease of deploying applications using price dropping public IaaS environments.  Make no mistake, this facet of launching applications affords the same flexibility to consuming organizations; one-click terms acceptance, payment and they are off to the races to begin consuming services.  However, security, network connectivity and proximity-based routing should not suffer to deliver said environments to customer eyeballs.

 

One of our favorite images comes from our friends a Redhat who easily break down the IaaS, SasS, PaaS stair climb against on-premise, namely if it resided in the DataCenter

IaaS has changed shape, go-to-market, and the overall product offering with various starts and stops in just 5 years!  Yes, AWS has been at the top of the list for this entire run but what is interesting is the real-life Meme “How it Started vs. How it’s Going” is quite literally a real-life scenario.  In this 5-year window, many providers jumped into the IaaS market only to either shut their cloud infrastructure, sell it off or it became something else.  Gartner has been following IaaS during its journey and the mapping has been intriguing.

 

Since IaaS is the driving “cloud brand” most people are familiar with, expect 2021 to be very much the same with the aforementioned 2020 leaders unchanged.  A huge research and development opportunity focus in 2021 will certainly be in a deep SaaS & PaaS market.  This is the natural course of cloud evolution now that infrastructure is standardizing.

Example of Top IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS investments organizations are betting on in 2021

PaaS

Oracle PaaS is a comprehensive, standards-based, integrated combination of Oracle and open-source technologies that enable you to build, deploy, migrate, and manage a variety of application workloads in a secure environment.

 

Force.com – SalesForce Lightening

If you pick up any article, SalesForce continues to develop their platform to own the CRM space and beyond.  Since its launch, it continues to be the Force (had to say it) in the industry even with other solid platforms such as Hubspot.

 

Honorable mentions in PaaS include Network as a Service options with Equinix, Packet Fabric and Megaport.  Their ingenuity for multi-cloud connectivity to support workloads is slick.  No more waiting weeks to turn up a 1G or 10Gig port to your favorite SaaS tool or another public cloud provider.  Now you can, click, drag, drop, and configure your settings in minutes and use solid tools such as Terraform to deploy services.

IaaS

Google Cloud continues to launch new enhancements and security features led by some of the industry veterans like Thomas Kurian.  Application modernization, Database, Security and Smart Analytics to name a few components make up GCP

 

 

Oracle Cloud

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

Some of Macronet’s largest partners such as 8×8, selected Oracle Cloud as did Zoom as a go to public IaaS option to support their workloads for customers.  Oracle continues to look at its existing base of database customers for a lift and shift approach into their cloud supporting the journey for clients  It’s affordable, IOPS are super-fast, and they have a heritage of enterprise support.

 

 

SaaS – PerimiterX,

Web Application Firewall & Bot Mitigation continues to deploy further into the cloud infrastructure environments for web apps.  Now, more SaaS companies continue to deploy unique niche services to protect enterprises and users from malicious intent.

PerimeterX:  Their Code Defender SaaS platform assists organizations in preventing malicious activity for some of the largest brands globally.   How to prevent  Magecart attacks?  PerimeterX’s Code Defender has a solution for that and can run analysis quickly with their tools to see if your web applications have potential vulnerabilities.

 

ServiceNow

You can argue they provide a PaaS and SaaS model aiding in workflow management across IT, Help Desk, Product and more.

Their recent acquisition of Lightsep should bolster their observability across workflow in areas such as AIOps.  ServiceNow is another example of a platform and software ecosystem breaking down barriers of communication & support across IT.

 

Thousands of Cloud options exist and unfortunately product fatigue can set in trying to understand what is the best cloud option for your business.  Macronet Services spends hours in training with these Cloud Partners and has experience on the front-end design with contractual pricing.  This insight reduces cycle time for our customers and is a welcomed experience when time is limited.   Please ask if we can provide advice on IaaS, PaaS and SaaS options for your business or let us know of a new offering you think we should cover!