Cloud Computing: Platforms for Productivity

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

The cloud computing market has seen a huge increase in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) adoption, two popular solutions that midsize firms utilize to achieve the business results they desire. With the right groundwork, growing firms can reach new levels of productivity.

Drivers in the Cloud

A new survey of IT professionals, reported by CloudTweaks and conducted by Gigaom Research and North Bridge Partners, cited the latest trends, including the drivers and inhibitors to cloud use. The fourth annual "Future of Cloud Computing" study revealed several trends: Almost 75 percent of firms are using SaaS, a fivefold increase; more than 50 percent of sales and marketing teams and more than 40 percent of customer service and analytics teams are adopting SaaS; and PaaS, used to prototype and develop new apps, has seen a sixfold increase with adoption at 40 percent. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is also reaching new levels of use: More than 55 percent of firms are employing IaaS to gain more flexibility…

The overall results point to the fact that cloud computing adoption is a strategic part of IT today. Half of the firms surveyed are using the cloud to create revenue or new products, while 45 percent are running their organization from the cloud. The results also show that most respondents believe that their corporate data will increasingly live in the cloud within the next two years…

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