Platforms on Demand
Above the level of raw infrastructure is the platform layer. Increasingly, enterprises are focusing on delivering platform-level functionality as an on-demand service to other consumers within the larger enterprise. This results in the breakdown of stovepipes, greater collaboration between groups, and far better economies of scale to the overall business.
Database as a Service (DBaaS): A database is a fundamental platform on which to build applications. Yet many developers in larger organizations reinvent the wheel for each and every application, deploying a new database each time. It’s far more efficient for an organization to offer a general clustered database service to all the parts of the business. The result is greater agility as a new database is created dynamically, in minutes, rather than waiting weeks for new hardware and software to arrive. A database service may support multiple different types of data stores to achieve different cost/performance targets (e.g. Oracle, Greenplum, and MySQL).
Identity as a Service (IDaaS): Many applications need to identify users and grant them access rights or permissions. Rather than recreate the wheel yet again, identity as a service capabilities can be deployed in the enterprise, delivering federated identity capabilities and universal sign-on and management capabilities to all applications that use the service. As a result, users don’t have to remember as many passwords, the identity data is better managed and backed up in a central location, and applications work better together.
Desktop as a Service (DaaS): Management of desktop software is one of the largest cost centers in an organization’s IT budget. Through the use of virtual desktop technology and pre-built desktop stacks that run in the cloud, enterprises can reduce deployment costs, simplify upgrade costs, and get better control on client security. DaaS is particularly helpful for application developers who must test their applications in the end-user environment. Rather than trying to build client desktop environments from scratch, it’s possible to create an end-user environment in minutes.
