Technology in the cloud, but not out of control

It’s easy to recognise a potential conflict emerging between the hard-pressed CEO looking to cloud computing to cut costs and his CIO concerned about a consequent loss of control. Yet as developments in the Business Process Management arena have already demonstrated, this does not have to be an either/or argument. A ‘Platform-as-a-Service’ offers a cost-efficient SaaS model to internal and external users, but without the limitations associated with hosting off-site. However attractive or intriguing SaaS appears, businesses rightly are concerned about trusting mission-critical processes, policies and data to an externally-hosted environment. By contrast, BPM PaaS removes the risks typically associated with SaaS solutions, such as integration, security, visibility and reliability, so they can focus on applying the benefits of BPM across the enterprise. And this becomes even more compelling as global enterprises use PaaS to rapidly drive out cost from the business and assimilate acquired businesses.