The “As-a-Service” Revolution: How Cloud-based Services are Reshaping the Enterprise
The growth of cloud-based services is challenging customers to second-guess their brick and mortar investments. From price and performance to state of the art technology, enterprises are ready to return the complex task of managing advanced services to cloud providers. This shift not only complements the mobile aspect of employee, consumer and partner interaction in today’s marketplace, but also allows enterprises to focus more on their core business, enabling further growth.
Cloud-based services offer enterprises the opportunity to expand their footprint of allocated resources with the ability to elastically employ globalized applications. This addresses events such as increases in natural volume, and enhances the quality of experience by placing content closer to end users. Businesses today can spawn resources out of a predefined application template within minutes, ensuring the same level of integrity expected from their traditional brick and mortar designs and targeted within the cloud to a specific geographical region.
By leveraging advanced services, these cloud-based resources can participate in a global mesh of secured application resources anchored by application delivery controller (ADC) services like authentication, global server load balancing (GSLB), and performance optimization as well as cybersecurity tools like Denial of Service (DoS) protection, intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and web application firewalls (WAF).
These “as-a-Service” solutions cater to real-time provisioning, contextual service delivery and on-demand solution elasticity, guaranteed to lower costs while delivering superior quality of experience with best of breed technology. In short, the advancement of cloud-based services is driving business agility while extending access to technology that may have previously been cost prohibitive.
To be sure, moving advanced services to the service provider does not come at the expense of valuable enterprise resources. Rather, it’s an opportunity to re-focus critical skill-sets to accelerate workflows and proprietary tools geared towards innovation and operational efficiency. The change gives IT more time to collaborate with other departments, like marketing, in order to capitalize on the evolving business landscape and further accelerate business in mobilized e-commerce markets. In fact, this IT recipe is naturally fueling a value chain that spans from application and content providers to consumers capable of accelerating the global economy. Small and large enterprises alike can share in the success of technology innovators that have improved application life cycles, reduced cost and minimized risk for cloud services. Service providers have an important role to play in providing reliable and quantifiable services while mentoring technology partners to work on behalf of end users. Like it or not, there is no doubt that service providers have become stewards of a better tomorrow.
