Robert Desisto recently posted Gartner’s 2013 Software as a Service predictions, and an IT professional asked me for my opinion. Here are my thoughts on how the SaaS predictions impact enterprise IT strategies and tactics:
Key findings from the Gartner predictions include:
- [SaaS] Service-level agreements (SLAs) will continue to lag behind customer needs.
My Take: Most likely true for enterprise organizations that require significant availability, reliability, and performance. Inserting a gateway/proxy in between the enterprise users and the SaaS application can help organizations monitor SaaS compliance with SLAs.
- Platform as a service (PaaS) will become a must-have for enterprise-class software as a service (SaaS) applications.
My Take: I would moderate this statement and propose “Teams developing SaaS applications will gain greater productivity by building on top of PaaS platforms that internally manage multi-tenancy, tenant-aware and service-aware load balancing, resource pooling, and elastic scalability. SaaS applications built as cloud-aware applications on multi-tenant, shared container PaaS will maximize scalability while reducing cost per tenant. what is your evaluation criteria for selecting an appropriate PaaS platform?
- The role of Internal Cloud Service Brokers will become more important for Enterprise SaaS intiatives.
My Take: Internal Cloud Service brokers can overlay identity provisioning, security and service level management on external Enterprise SaaS offerings. An internal cloud service broker can be implemented in-house by deploying an API manager product that will monitor usage, enforce access policies, enforce subscription policies, and provide a single user provisioning console.
What are your SaaS predictions that impact application service adoption?
{{ parent.title || parent.header.title}}
{{ parent.tldr }}
{{ parent.linkDescription }}
{{ parent.urlSource.name }}