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Platform-as-a-Service: The Game Changer

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"Using PaaS, it’s possible to save millions of dollars on a single, large-scale software development project. Developers can create and deploy software faster. Agencies can lower their risks, promote shared services and improve software security via a common security model. Data centers can leverage PaaS to make their infrastructure more valuable. PaaS can lower the skill requirements to engineer new systems and can lower risks by taking advantage of pretested technologies. It has been said that it takes an order-of-magnitude improvement to change the industry. PaaS provides an order-of-magnitude improvement in how software is engineered." - Platform as a Service (PaaS). What Is It? Why Is It So Important?

This is the core premise that's driving 2012 as the year of the platform.  Cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service, clearly at the heart of the recent The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), is now opening the door for the economic value of platform-as-a-service.  Often a confusing topic, PaaS provides the consistent middleware needed for explosive growth in federal cloud software. Although the current PaaS implementations are linked to the cloud service provider's infrastructure, the government's aversion to anything that look like "vendor lock-in" is driving a search for infrastructure independence  in PaaS. The Canadian government has also identified PaaS as an important part of their own cloud deployment. According to Cloud Computing Best Practices Network, the ‘Cloud Security Zones‘ document from Shared Services Canada defines logical models for co-location, IaaS and PaaS:

“This document also provides guidance as to how departmental security domains can be connected to an ITSS shared services domain for the consumption of shared platforms and applications (i.e. Platform as a Service and Software as a Service). This architecture is considered essential to the successful deployment and certification of the GC Community Cloud.”

Stay tuned for more in 2012. As the core technology for shared government information technology services, Platform-as-a-service will be the next GovCloud battleground.