OREANDA-NEWS. December 01, 2015. “The long-predicted growth in cloud adoption is now finally accelerating innovation, scalability and business agility, resulting in inventive business models and business growth,” writes Nachiket Deshpande. “As many companies already have highly virtualized infrastructure in place, their IT strategy is increasingly focused on cloud adoption as a means of not just driving cost efficiencies but also innovation.” Excerpts:

“Increasingly, businesses are looking at ways to ease the burden of meeting regulatory compliance and security requirements by implementing the relevant cloud adoption strategies.

As cloud computing is maturing at a rapid pace with many "as-a-service" type offerings such as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), desktop-as-a-service (DaaS), disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), such developments have paved the way for the anything-as-a-service (XaaS) model. This can be seen as the founding pedestal for next version of the cloud development: the "vertical cloud". The vertical cloud is designed to deliver core applications, tools and the corresponding biota of a specific vertical that allow organizations to customize cloud services themselves to their specific needs and tastes.

The vertical cloud allows enterprises to pick and choose what to operate in the cloud and on customer’s premises, based on security and compliance requirements that govern their businesses. In industries such as banking and finance or insurance, for example, regulatory compliance is the prime driver while choosing the relevant architecture for their IT Infrastructure. With major regulations on banking and finance on the way, including Basel III or the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ensuring regulatory compliance will remain a major area of investment during 2015 and into next year.

Using the vertical cloud shifts the onus of compliance to the cloud provider on account of their proven and re-usable governance and security frameworks. Vertical cloud offerings can come pre-packaged with the required regulatory obligations and thus offer organizations a relief from the encumbrance of ensuring compliance themselves.

Security and regulatory compliance are complex and exhaustive, requiring IT infrastructure and applications to be constantly ready for ever-evolving demands.

Pursuing the vertical cloud strategy can help business not only to advance and accelerate business growth and gain competitive advantage, but also to mitigate security and regulatory compliance.”