SaaS Benefits And Concerns Explored By Gartner

A new report from Gartner has looked into the reasons why companies are adopting cloud services.

The report entitled “Survey Analysis: Buyers Reveal Cloud Application Adoption Plans Through 2017” encompassed 10 countries, and was conducted back in May and June of this year, examining the deployment of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS (software, infrastructure and platform as a service respectively).

The main reasons behind adoption of these cloud services were cost savings, innovation and increased agility; the usual arguments in other words.

Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner, commented: “The most commonly cited reasons the survey found for deploying SaaS were for development and testing production/mission-critical workloads. We’ve seen a real transition from use cases in previous surveys where early SaaS adoption focused on smaller pilot projects. Today, the projects are mission-critical and production grade.”

Correia concluded: “This is an affirmation that more businesses are comfortable with cloud deployments beyond the front office running sales force automation (SFA) and email.”

In total, 44 per cent of respondents cited cost reduction as the reason for deployment, and this remained the leading reason. It rated most highly for junior IT managers though, with higher-level CIOs and IT directors ranking it as a key benefit, but alongside operational agility and innovation.

Gartner’s research also found that few companies totally go the SaaS route, with most mixing SaaS and on-premise solutions. Additionally, due to security and privacy concerns, the majority of organisations said they’d push adoption of a private cloud – 46 per cent of them – compared to 24 per cent looking at the public cloud when planning for the next two years.

Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner, said: “Data loss, data breaches, unsecure application programming interfaces (APIs) and shared technology in a multitenant environment are just a few of the concerns expressed by respondents tackling the option of using public cloud.”

In spite of these sort of security worries, however, respondents said they will continue to invest in the public cloud for SaaS deployment, with a key reason being that the hands-off nature of SaaS frees up other in-house staff to tackle other tasks. Swift deployment of the software service is also a big plus, as well.