Discovering IaaS, SaaS And PaaS

The cloud market is maturing rapidly, helped by a new generation of "born in the cloud" providers that are offering alternatives to compete with traditional IT offerings, while traditional cloud providers are looking to improve features and functionality, Gartner believes.

Addressing 50 MES attendees, Gartner analyst Mike Dorosh said midmarket firms will use all three service models of cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. And they shouldn't depend on just one provider, he said.

Further, he urged midmarket IT directors – especially those that are strapped for budget - to turn to MSPs that can support deployments of public cloud platform leaders Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google. Those MSPs can usually provide "significantly better" service-level agreements than the platform leaders, Gartner believes. MSPs can also bring automation, architecture and operational capabilities to support workloads, and provide migration support and service brokerage capabilities, the research firm says.