Business Benefits of PaaS

The potential cost savings of IaaS are clear — you can rent compute resources only when you need them. So, you pay only for what you use. PaaS can operate in a similar fashion to IaaS by allowing companies to use a PaaS service during development and deployment, instead of having to purchase many different independent tools.

In a hybrid environment, when the same PaaS environment can support both public and private services, organizations can benefit by this level of flexibility and agility. By providing a homogenous platform, workloads can easily be moved from a private cloud to a public cloud for deployment and efficient scaling. This allows organizations to have a high degree of control on where a particular application is running. Some of the business benefits of PaaS include reduced costs and increased speed of development and deployment.

Reducing costs

By providing the underlying software infrastructure, PaaS can reduce organizational costs. PaaS reduces many of the costs involved with the traditional application development and deployment model, including the ones we discuss here.

Server and storage overhead

Writing and testing new programs are compute-intensive and require large amounts of server and storage space. Typically, once the development and deployment stages are complete, a company’s server and storage space lie largely dormant. This underutilized computing capacity requires power, cooling, and maintenance to run, as well as floor space. As a result, organizations often devote considerable amounts of money to unused capacity.

When utilizing a PaaS, companies don’t have excess resources in reserve. The development tools are provided by the PaaS, and not all of the iterations of the code need to be stored in the data center. These savings on server and storage overhead are realized whether developing on-premises or in the cloud. When developing in the cloud, although you don’t need additional physical servers and storage, you do need to deploy and pay for a larger virtual machine (VM) and more storage.

Network bandwidth

The development and deployment process can put a strain on network bandwidth within a data center. Development teams must perform workload testing to see how the application will perform under different circumstances. This requirement to allocate network resources may slow down the operation of other applications or may require the acquisition of more bandwidth capacity. PaaS enables testing to be done in the cloud, rather than in the data center.

Software maintenance

The cost of managing software updates and changes is often a burden to development and operational organizations and a huge expense in terms of time and money. Although the cost structure of a PaaS requires a per-user, per-month charge, the cost is typically offset by reducing or eliminating software license costs and yearly maintenance fees. The platform vendor manages all patches and updates for the hardware and software and also provides physical and software security for the automation of day-to-day tasks.

Support personnel

To keep software and systems up to date and running smoothly and to fix problems when they occur, organizations must have IT staff at the ready — for everything from storage and archiving to patch management, networks, security, and the help desk. By adopting a standardized platform across an organization, hardware and software conflicts are greatly reduced, resulting in simplified service and support. This level of standardization and automation allows organizations to reduce or refocus its teams away from routine tasks.

Careless mistakes

During application development and deployment, there’s also a great deal of pressure on teams to get work done quickly. This pressure often results in careless mistakes. Take, for instance, the case of somebody forgetting to load a configuration file. It could take a week before the problem is identified and fixed. Such mistakes add up to time and money and cause deployment delays. With PaaS, such mistakes are reduced or entirely eliminated because the platform has been fully tested and is known to work. Developers don’t get tied down with the middleware and tedious tasks that are prone to hasty mistakes.

Lower-skill requirements

Development tools and middleware are complex and aren’t standardized. Successfully deploying an application takes a high degree of skill and experience. The learning curve on these skills is steep, and there’s also an ongoing need to manage these components. Perhaps only one or two people in an organization have the skills necessary to work with a certain kind of middleware. By providing the development tools and middleware, a PaaS lowers the skill level required to deploy applications and removes the bottleneck that can form while waiting for one specific person’s assistance.

Improving speed, flexibility, and agility

In terms of getting products to market fast and aligning agile development practices, continuous delivery is the ultimate goal. PaaS can provide greater speed, flexibility, and agility to the development process. By providing a predictable, heterogeneous application infrastructure, organizations don’t get bogged down with enabling applications and can quickly meet the needs of customers. PaaS helps to do the following:

Enable faster time to market by allowing development teams to focus on the application

Enhance ability to react to changes and opportunities because the organization doesn’t have large up-front costs associated with typical application development and deployment

Spread capital investments further, which allows a company to be more competitive