While the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model remains dominant in terms of market share, growth and breadth of coverage, a new research report says other cloud computing models have established themselves as contenders and are themselves undergoing rapid growth despite some issues.
Worldwide SaaS revenues will reach US$53 billion by 2018, or 59 per cent of the enterprise public cloud computing market, says a new report from U.K.-based Juniper Research. SaaS brought in US$23.2 billion last year.
The report, titled “Cloud Computing – Enterprise Markets: SaaS, PaaS & IaaS, 2014-2018,” says SaaS will remain the dominant cloud model, thanks in part to its relative maturity and widespread acceptance, and broad recognition of the comparative benefits and risks of commissioning cloud-based software.
Juniper expects the overall enterprise cloud computing market to reach US$90.7 billion by 2018, with both Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) also showing growth. This is in spite of concerns over the data security, compliance and portability of both models.
“Both PaaS and IaaS will experience significant growth over the forecast period as new applications, developed specifically for the cloud to harness workloads such as big data analysis, benefit from the PaaS ‘fast-track’ model,” Juniper said.
“Service providers are increasingly providing multi-lingual support, and improving portability through initiatives such as Cloud Foundry, while consolidation of PaaS as an extension of other cloud services is showing a rising trend.”
For its part IaaS is becoming increasingly attractive to small to midsized businesses as well as large enterprises, because it provides a high level of control over the software stack. It also provides good security control, an important consideration as the need for proper risk assessment is increasingly appreciated by corporate security managers.
“At the forefront of many customers’ concerns with regards to services deployed in the public cloud space are a number of issues, not only about the protection of privacy in the cloud, but also making sure that service providers adhere to regulatory and compliance requirements,” Juniper said. “Tying in with these concerns is an element of trust, whereby giving up control of services to a third-party can be a difficult move to make.”
Juniper said confidence in the public cloud has suffered following Edward Snowden’s NSA (National Security Agency) revelations, meaning that service providers have to rebuild trust.
It also said customers have to do their homework ahead of time to figure out whether to deploy services in the cloud, and what services the cloud makes most sense for.