Why Software as a Service benefits trump IaaS

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

The next big wave of cloud computing may favor Software as a Service benefits over basic cloud infrastructure, at least if one professional staffing services firm has its way. Sean Perry, chief information officer for Menlo Park, Calif.-based Robert Half International Inc., a heavy user of Amazon Web Services for cloud infrastructure, is looking to deploy more Software as a Service (SaaS) products. SearchCloudComputing caught up with him to reflect on 2013 and hear his cloud computing predictions for 2014. What cloud computing projects did you work on this year? What were the benefits of those projects?

Sean Perry: There were three types of projects that we executed in 2013 related to the cloud.

The first type was projects that positioned systems for easier migration to the cloud in the future. These were very pragmatic projects where some type of upgrade or other work was already planned, and we took advantage of the opportunity to change the underlying technology infrastructure to support future migration to the cloud. This had incremental benefits, in that the newer technologies performed much better. [It also gave] us the opportunity to move [development and test] environments to the cloud and out of our data center…

The second type was projects that were part of our "cloud first" strategy. New applications are being delivered this way by default. These were challenging, as it’s safe to say that the majority of [the] products [we purchase] are intended for on-premises implementation, and working with vendors to develop a supported infrastructure in the cloud can be challenging…

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