OREANDA-NEWS. December 23, 2015. In our last blog, Top Cloud IaaS Use Cases we described some of the top cloud providers big Infrastructure-as-a Service (IaaS) use case wins over the past couple of years. Here are some interesting Platform-as-a Service (PaaS) use cases that demonstrate perfectly how the cloud can do things mere mortal enterprise IT organizations may find very difficult or impossible.

Humongous Big Data

Big Data may be too modest a term for SunGard Financial’s ambitious partnership with Google to architect and build a cloud system prototype that can store six years of U.S. stock and other financial trading info—including every single quote and trade — for analysis by regulators and stock traders. According to SunGard, that’s 100 billion events daily amounting to 30 petabytes over six years. The prototype is being created to compete for a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission contract, called the Consolidate Auditing Trail (CAT).

SunGard produced a prototype that could handle 10 billion events per hour. Obviously the hardware, scalability and operational requirements were simply too massive for SunGard to handle everything in house. Amazingly, thanks to the time-to-market wonders of the Google Cloud, SunGard was able to build the prototype in six weeks.

Said Neil Palmer, SunGard’s chief technology officer for its consulting services practice, “There is no way we could have done that, even with similar technologies, if we had to stand up our own infrastructure.”

Going All In with AWS

2nd Watch, a cloud-based company, specializes in helping other organizations migrate to AWS using its tools and services for automating migration, procurement, provisioning, operations, financial management and governance. 2nd Watch realizes a slew of benefits from its AWS-based solution, including slashed time to market, internal efficiency, scalability, and the ability to execute globally with a similar set of products and functionality. The AWS solution has enabled the company to increase bookings by a whopping 260% per year, year over year.

Said Jeff Aden, EVP of 2nd Watch strategic business development and co-founder, “Working with AWS has specifically helped our product development team by allowing them to test and make changes to products quickly and inexpensively. It also helps us surpass our customers’ expectations with cost optimization and managed services, as several of our core products focus on those areas.”

These case studies highlight what businesses can achieve when they interconnect to PaaS cloud solutions. Our customers experience similar performance and growth when accessing our dense ecosystem of PaaS providers, including AWS, Azure, SoftLayer and Google, via the Equinix Cloud Exchange.

Learn about our Equinix Cloud Exchange platform partners:

Google Cloud Platform

Amazon Web Services

Microsoft Azure and Office365 

Swimming Upstream

Nothing benefits from scale on demand like media streaming. That’s why U.K.-based movie and television streaming service blinkbox turned to Microsoft Azure so it could start streaming new releases in hours or days rather than weeks. Fast encoding becomes even more crucial when a new generation of mobile device or technology appears and the service has to encode its entire library for the new platform.

Blinkbox was trying to do it all in house but it just proved too difficult, so the company started migrating to Azure about two years ago. It took advantage of Azure Media Services tools ̶ a media encoding and distribution solution that supports media streaming to Adobe Flash, Android, iOS, Windows, HTML5, and other devices and platforms. Azure has allowed blinkbox to grow by 245% in a single year without a tremendous investment in infrastructure.

“In a business like ours that is trying to grow very quickly but not sink a fortune into infrastructure, this sort of solution is brilliant,” says Adrian Letts, blinkbox co-founder and COO.