Wednesday 6 April 2016

Seen Software (SaaS), Infrastructure (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)? Try Desktop (DaaS), Metal (MaaS) and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)

It's no secret that the public cloud market has been growing like wildfire. In fact, a recent Gartner study found spending on public cloud services is growing at more than 28% per year and private cloud spending is three times that of public cloud!  That suggests total cloud spending in 2016 to hit £155 billion.
The focus in the industry over the past few years has been on the core cloud management services of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.  But to truly understand how cloud computing is evolving you have to dive deeper below the surface.  Two major developments are driving the evolution of cloud: Management and Specialisation.
In the management space, innovations like self-service portals have given end-users a much-preferred way to request and consume their services.  Whereas specialist and dedicated professionals, have developed enterprise solutions with technologies like Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View and Nvidia GRID.  
Three specialist areas that have developed as part of natural market progression, are DRaaS, MaaS & DaaS - but what are they?

MaaS

MaaS - the dynamic provisioning and deployment of whole physical servers, as opposed to the provisioning of virtual machines - is a drastically underrated cloud service.  MaaS services will finally open the floodgates to allow any application to be run in the cloud – any application with any service level.  That means multi-tiered apps with a backend Oracle database, home grown, performance-intensive applications, low latency trading applications, etc. 
It’s been hard for people to pay attention to MaaS, mostly because server virtualisation has been “the shiny new toy” over the past few years and frankly MaaS is not an easy thing to provide. But that may change once IT administrators see the speed, scalability, agility and simplicity with which they can deploy and protect their underlying server infrastructure.
The statistics are clear – a large percentage of servers have been virtualized in the enterprise (40% - 50% now and heading to 60% - 70%). However, there are still a large number of applications that remain running on bare metal. That important (and underappreciated) fact means that MaaS could be a key ingredient to driving more widespread adoption of cloud technology.

DRaaS

Over the past few years, IT departments have had to live in a culture of cost reduction – it’s just been the way of life.  That culture has resulted in aging equipment, overworked staff and lots of cut corners - a perfect recipe for higher failure rates.  The fact is that hardware failure and human error are still the leading causes of unplanned outages - but devastating storms and other catastrophes are also forcing businesses to get serious about geographic disaster recovery planning.  Some estimates put 2014 weather related disaster costs at almost £70 billion worldwide, up 25% from 2013. 

DaaS

Desktop management is a fundamental service for IT organisations.  It’s critical for keeping the employees of a company productive. But there have been long standing challenges with managing the traditional desktop.  The investment in desktop hardware can be a significant capital expense, especially for large organisations and day-to-day management of these devices can be a huge drain on resources.
DaaS solutions are secure, cost-effective, easy-to-use and portable – you can get the same desktop on any device.
According to the 451 Research Group, “Interest in third-party DaaS is at fever pitch.” IT consumerisation, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) initiatives, increase in mobile workers, Windows 8 migrations and Security/IP concerns are driving organisations to reevaluate their desktop strategy.
So, if you're not looking at IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS...make sure you've seen DRaaS, DaaS & MaaS. 

Interested in looking at Cloud solutions?  Get in touch, to discuss migration strategies and pricing. 

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