The growth of cloud services for business has been a hot topic for years now, but 2012 was the year when the cloud went from market hype to mainstream deployment. Most organizations have now adopted a private cloud of some kind, but caution is preventing them from taking full advantage. Exploring the potential benefits of new tools is vital if IT departments hope to see real performance gains.

Recent Gartner research highlights the importance of digital technologies for CIOs in the coming year. Gartner's Mark McDonald described the problem succinctly, "IT needs new tools if it hopes to hunt for technology-intensive innovation and harvest raised business performance from transformed IT infrastructure, operations and applications. Without change, CIOs and IT consign themselves to tending a garden of legacy assets and responsibilities."

What Is the Problem?
As it stands we are seeing widespread adoption of private clouds that essentially act as virtualized infrastructure. That's undeniably useful, but it doesn't solve the underlying business problem which is how to accelerate the delivery of features. Features come from the application. If we really want to leverage the potential power of the private cloud then we should be working toward a setup that supports fast, cost-efficient and error-free changes to the application layer.

What we're talking about here is adding value by rolling out features internally and externally at a much quicker clip without jeopardizing the end quality. We need to go beyond infrastructure to private PaaS.

Why PaaS May Fall Short
There are quite a few PaaS solutions on the market, but many of them are not suitable for today's enterprise and there are a number of reasons for that. The majority of them run fully or mainly in the public cloud, which immediately raises security concerns. They tend to support a very limited subset of middleware and database solutions, so integration is difficult. Interoperability has not been given enough weight and that can lead to serious difficulties down the line. There's a real lack of mobility for an application deployed via a typical PaaS service right now. You may find your business locked into a cloud service platform provider.

A start-up might see the value in adopting one of these PaaS solutions because it allows them to avoid capital expenditure at the outset, but what if your business already has a large datacenter? Many enterprises will want the option to use their existing setup and they'll naturally shy away from becoming reliant on a particular vendor environment.

What Is the Goal?
What we are really looking for here is the ability to deliver the benefits of PaaS with your existing middleware environment. You need a solution that supports automated, efficient, error-free application updates. You need a system that supports auto-scaling of your runtime environment. You need a system that can deliver an end-to-end insight into your running applications and their configuration.

The aim is to free your business and your development team from the cost and complexity of managing the underlying hardware and software systems that allow you to deploy your applications. When a new feature request comes in or customer feedback leads development in a new direction, private PaaS should enable you to deliver faster than ever before and with fewer errors. An automation interface that is accessible for the team is infinitely more efficient, not to mention more cost-effective.

Working Towards Automation
Once you have a private PaaS it's important to ensure that your new features are rolled out onto the platform automatically if you want to leverage the maximum benefits from the system. Integration of your development tooling and test suites will enable your company to provide frequent, automated updates of incremental feature improvements that happen automatically.

The benefits are obvious both internally and externally. Not only can you automatically scale and manage your existing functionality as required, but you can also add new functionality without fear of introducing errors. It's easy to get a clear overview of your complete application state every step of the way.

If you can roll out new features and updates in this way then your development team can remain focused on what's important - improving the product and delivering value to its users.