“The metric for cloud success isn’t just cost efficiency or even business agility – it’s velocity.” These wise words from Forrester’s Cloud Powers in Adaptive Enterprise report ring true.
The speed of business transformation is the most critical metric for every company recovering from the pandemic, not to mention helping its customers recover as well. An increasing number of organizations are turning to low-code platforms to create applications and automate tasks as part of this recovery, and the majority are choosing to do this in the cloud due to its agility.
A Platform-as-a-Service-based (PaaS) approach to application development can help organizations to accelerate out of any issues they have encountered. A bit like when Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and the Star Wars crew jump to lightspeed to evade Darth Vader and the Empire.
Sticking with that analogy, here’s how PaaS can help you to use the force to transform your organization with speed and purpose.
It’s a changing world and those that don’t make the move to PaaS risk being left behind. As Forrester states, “Cloud is no longer tactical, but rather a strategic enabler of connected platform economies… Firms will become cloud platform companies themselves – stewards of their own cloud ecosystems.”
So where exactly does PaaS fit into the cloud ecosystem? Think of the ecosystem like the Empire, with the droids at the bottom, acting as the on-premises software that require the most maintenance and don’t offer much velocity to operations. The hardware needs to be programmed, manually maintained and backed-up. At the top sits Software as a Service (SaaS), like the Emperor Palpatine: the self-service software that empowers users to get stuff done, fast! Gmail, Salesforce, and Grammarly come to mind.
In between, you have Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which forms the foundation of IT operations. Like the Storm Troopers, Microsoft Azure and AWS will carry out the essential day-to-day operations and are constantly running in the background to keep everything operating smoothly.
Think of Container as a Service as the Imperial Army Generals and Officers. It’s the automated hosting and deployment of containerized software packages and is essential for DevOps. But because they deal with the more technical side of things, systems like Docker and OpenShift are often inaccessible to business users in the big picture of the ecosystem.
Then you have Platform as a Service: Sith Lords who have the power to build and deploy new solutions. These development tools are mostly used by software developers, but many of them have low-code features which are providing the velocity for citizen developers to drive their organization’s digital transformation. The force is strong in this one.
There are lots of different types of cloud-based software, but PaaS is the fastest-growing segment for the enterprise. In 2021, PaaS accounted for 56% of enterprise cloud spend, up from just 32% in 2017, according to Tech Jury. This is likely due to its ability to drive digital transformation in-house when so many organizations feel like they’re playing catch-up with their applications. Developers can focus on their work while the PaaS provider runs daily logistics in the background.
The PaaS provider hosts everything you need at their data center, from servers and storage and databases and development tools. This allows PaaS customers to build, run and scale their applications faster than if they had to build their own infrastructure and manage their own on-premises platform.
But we’re not just talking about transformation in terms of speed, but also direction. Cloud-native PaaS not only helps organizations to transform quickly but towards a specified target. You wouldn’t make the jump to lightspeed without a known destination – that’s just asking for trouble!
Consider the Four Ds methodology: Discover, define, develop, deliver. A low-code process automation PaaS can help you with all these steps. Start with process discovery using process models, then define the low-code applications, develop them with continuous improvement in agile sprints and ultimately deliver an optimal application.
In terms of velocity, there are plenty of benefits to be seen from operating from a cloud-native PaaS:
Start immediately – There are no set-up times. Your PaaS provider will host everything for you. All you need to do is choose your license based on usage and get started.
Quick time to value – The quick set-up, ease of use, and accessibility of PaaS means that your employees can get to grips with it quickly and start seeing results fast, whether that be in the form of automated processes or a whole new enterprise application.
Decreased time to market – Cloud-native solutions minimize infrastructure management, so IT can spend less time-solving issues such as continuous integration, regression testing, and zero-downtime deployment. Instead, they can focus on solving problems and creating applications and ultimately increase agility.
Leverage new capabilities with managed upgrades – You’ll be privy to all the latest features, and your IT staff can continue working on high-value projects while the upgrades are carried out in the background.
Scale as needed – If you need to modify or scale your applications, it’s easy to increase your resources. Plus, it can be done quickly so you don’t need to worry about it holding up your development time.
So why not build your own Death Star using cloud-native PaaS? The platform can scale as needed as you design more enterprise applications, and there’s the added benefit that you only pay for what you need. So, it can be more cost-effective than on-premises solutions as there are no ongoing costs for infrastructure, maintenance and upgrades. You can use a single PaaS platform for multiple business solutions.
Bizagi now runs entirely in the cloud, delivering benefits to customers through our low-code automation PaaS. Current Bizagi users can find out more about our move to the cloud or contact your Bizagi Customer Success team for more information.
Punch it, Chewie!
