This week I have been following the Structure Conference which the GigaOm team has been nice enough to stream out on the net. One of the panels was what does the future of cloud computing look like. Like everything else about the cloud, data and lots of it, will be involved. Data is driving the cloud. But in Matthew Ingram’s post on the panel he says, “that “platform as a service” (PaaS) is the inevitable successor to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry that most companies have become accustomed to . .”
When I first read that sentence I thought it meant that PaaS would replace SaaS as the delivery method of choice. I immediately thought to myself, maybe for some types of applications, but not for security. I was discussing this with Gray Hall, my fellow SCR blogger and Alert Logic CEO. Gray had a different take on this. He thought that what Ingram is saying is not that Paas will replace SaaS per say. It will be as popular or more than SaaS, but what it will actually replace is IaaS. In other words, many ISVs will want just put their apps on top of the platform, instead of having to also build the platform on top of the infrastructure in IaaS.
On reflection, I have to agree with Gray. I don’t see PaaS replacing SaaS, especially in security. But I do see PaaS replacing IaaS. In fact, once an application is built on PaaS, isn’t it still delivered as a SaaS solution? So PaaS will in fact become a catalyst for even more SaaS.
Back to security for a moment though. IaaS, PaaS or whatever, security is still an issue. One of the biggest differences I see between IaaS and PaaS as far security goes, is that in IaaS security is bolted on after the fact. As such it is “optional”, though how anyone can leave out security is beyond me. In PaaS, security is built in to the platform. The PaaS consumer doesn’t have to think about what security needs to be bolted on. It is a more holistic model for security.
In either model, PaaS or IaaS, security delivered via SaaS is the only scalable way to deliver this at cloud levels. In fact at Alert Logic they have both IaaS and PaaS providers using the Alert Logic SaaS service to provide security to their customers. In IaaS it is an option, in PaaS it is part of the platform.
So I don’t think PaaS will replace SaaS, but it will become dominant over IaaS.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Gartner says global cloud services market to exceed $68bn in 2010 (newstatesman.com)
- PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services Series (diversity.net.nz)
- Structure 2010: Lowering Barriers for Platform-as-a-Service (gigaom.com)
- Structure 2010: What Does the Future of Cloud Computing Look Like? (gigaom.com)
- Cloud Computing and Rational SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS Management (web2.sys-con.com)
- Is PaaS Just Outsourced Application Server Platforms? (devcentral.f5.com)
