5 Ways Successful PaaS Adoption Will Impact Your Enterprise

Enterprises are always looking for new ways to make their operations faster and more cost-effective, and this is especially important when it comes to software development. It's become clear that traditional waterfall methods of building applications are no longer able to keep up with the rapidly-changing business environment.

That's why companies are increasingly turning to innovations like agile development and DevOps to make these processes faster and more efficient. But even when adopting these tools, there are still a range of challenges to deal with.

In-house development means investment in complex software stacks, handling security and managing ongoing maintenance and patching, which adds time, resources and cost to the development process.

However, like many other aspects of your IT environment, these issues can be tackled thanks to the cloud. Specially, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions can take much of the hassle out of software development by providing users with a single platform containing all the tools they need.

The rise of PaaS solutions

PaaS combines elements of Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service to give developers everything they require to support the entire application lifecycle, including:

• Software development tools
• Application programming interfaces
• Operating systems
• Storage and infrastructure

It's therefore becoming increasingly popular among businesses looking to streamline their development processes. Gartner predicts that the global market for public PaaS cloud services is set to grow from $24.6 billion in 2018 to $58 billion by 2022. Meanwhile, figures from IDG estimate more than six out of ten companies (61%) now deploy PaaS solutions in their operations.

PaaS is a particularly attractive cloud model for many firms as it provides a single, comprehensive solution that lets them focus on activities that’ll bring value to their business, rather than day-to-day maintenance. With all the infrastructure and software solutions included, they’re especially beneficial to organizations with limited resources and those with less experience of software development.

5 ways PaaS can improve your team's performance

But it's not just software developers who can enjoy the benefits PaaS can provide. In fact, the technology offers a wide range of advantages that can prove highly useful to people throughout the business. Here are five ways you can benefit from a successful PaaS deployment:

1. Shorten your time to market

A key feature of PaaS and one that’ll benefit the entire company is that it removes the need for firms to build, configure, and provision their own platforms. Prebuilt components, ready-made infrastructure and sample code means firms can get started on developments faster, add resources as required during the process and, ultimately, go from initial idea to full production much faster.

This allows firms to be more agile and responsive to what's going on in the wider industry and puts innovative applications in the hands of users to meet evolving demands.

2. Increase your productivity

DevOps teams will benefit from having many of the tedious manual processes taken off their hands, allowing them to improve their overall productivity. For example, because the PaaS solution is now responsible for the infrastructure, you won't have to worry about things like emergency server fixes in the middle of the night, while the scalability of the services means you can build out to a larger system without significant increases in the effort or resources required to manage this.

3. Focus on your code

For developers themselves, taking the hassle out of building a development environment means their time will be freed up to focus on what really matters - creating quality, unique code that’ll help your applications stand out. This could give developers more time to test out and experiment with new functionality or explore some of the options that PaaS can offer to enhance their activities that wouldn’t otherwise have been available.

4. Reduce costs

Business managers who’re concerned about the costs involved with development can also enjoy significant benefits from PaaS, as the technology not only offers reduced expenditure compared with traditional ways of managing these projects, but also improved agility to better respond to shifting needs.

Automation, improved efficiency in how infrastructure is utilized and the use of self-service interfaces can all contribute to a more efficient, cost-effective system. For example, Intel has reported that costs fell by 67.6% per application instance since moving applications from IaaS environments to PaaS systems.

5. Boost your scalability

There are several solutions contained within PaaS that make it easier for businesses to scale up their services quickly and easily. As well as being able to provision more infrastructure resources on demand whenever they’re needed, the reusable code inside the platform also makes it easier to build out and expand applications, by allowing developers to scale and modify their processes easily and efficiently.