According to an Oracle survey, only 32 percent of businesses understand what Platform as a Service (PaaS) is and 29 percent don't understand PaaS at all. This isn't a massive surprise because acronyms and jargon often do separate one group from another, and if you "get it" then you might never realise that there are other people in your company who don't.

Previously, it was acceptable if only a few people in IT understood the technology, because they were the gatekeepers. These days, it's important that everyone knows what the cloud offers them, why it's important and perhaps most importantly, how it can revolutionise a business.

Understanding PaaS (which confusingly is sometimes also referred to as ‘Cloud Platform’) is especially important too, because it can be the difference between an agile company, and one that can't react quickly enough to new challenges.

Oracle’s Dain Hansen says that a lack of understanding is partly down to journalists, sales and marketing teams misunderstanding or misusing the term, which has led to it becoming another ‘woolly’ buzzword.

“While a great deal has been written about PaaS in the trade press,” Hansen says in a post, “definitions of the technology have varied from article to article and brochure to brochure... it’s so essential that [managers] know exactly what falls under the term ‘Cloud Platform’: they need to understand all the technologies the phrase encompasses if they are to maximize the benefits from them.”

To make it simple, PaaS/Cloud Platform is all about making things happen quickly, and making them happen without any impact on your important customer-facing services. What PaaS offers is a way to separate live services from development ones, and then to merge your newly-developed applications into your live service once they're ready.

The Cloud Platform sits between IaaS and SaaS (Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service. It's easier to remember how all this works if you think that SaaS might be your customer-facing application and IaaS is the physical aspect, like storage networking and the computational hardware that runs your services. The platform allows these two things to communicate with each other.

PaaS also allows you to analyze data in huge volumes. This is becoming a crucial part of many businesses, and of course we're all used to hearing about "Big Data" as it hits the mainstream consciousness. For this reason the Cloud Platform is going to be a huge part of the coming year.

As businesses learn what it can offer, it's going to quickly become something that becomes the latest fashionable phrase. Don't fear it, because it can save you time, money and make your company even more nimble. It's going to change everything.

If you’re interested in learning about the finer points of PaaS and what advantages is can bring to your business, Oracle has a free guide available for download on their website.

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