You shall not PaaS…!
It’s fair to say I’ve been doing the Cloud thing for a while. Back around 2018, a fair chunk of my time was spent assessing the applications used by our customers across Enterprise (mainly Legal & Manufacturing), Local Government, and the wider Public Sector.
The goal? To help organisations see beyond the confines of their ageing data centres and imagine a future where those apps lived in the best possible place - whether on-premises or in the Cloud.
The most compelling Cloud migration cases - the ones that got both Tech teams and Execs nodding - always came back to modernising the classic 3-tier stack: database and file platforms, apps and web. The ones delivering real business value. Case Management Systems, Finance Systems, Clinical Imaging Systems. Moving these to Platform-as-a-Service felt like a no-brainer. The benefits are obvious (sometimes unrealised, but not the focus of this blog!).
But there’s always been one hurdle that’s hard to clear: the gap in vendor support for Cloud-native architectures.
Every time we assessed an app, we’d check in with the vendor:
“Do you support Azure SQL DB?”
“Can this run as a Container or an App Service?”
“Can we use managed identity?”
Every time, the answer was either a flat “No” or “The solution doesn’t exist yet.”
Never a “Maybe.” Never a “Yes, if…” Not even, "it's on our roadmap.”
Fast-forward 7 years. Cloud-native services have matured. Architecture’s evolved. You’d think vendors would’ve heard the call by now...right?
OK, I’m not that naïve.
They’ve heard us. But many vendors are focused on evolving their SaaS offerings and managing the complexity of supporting multiple deployment models. For them, it’s a delicate balance between innovation and supporting existing customer needs.
"So, 7 years on, where are we? Pretty much in the same place.
If you want to stick with your vendor, you’re likely looking at consuming their SaaS or hosted version - and going SaaS-first is absolutely the right way to go. But if you want - or need - to run it yourself, you’re still faced with IaaS solutions that don’t align with today’s Cloud-first expectations.
Well (and here we finally come to the point of all this)...for the first time in forever, I feel like a vendor has actually listened!
Scanning the Legal Tech news over at The Legal IT Insider, I came across a recent article on how LexisNexis “want to be able to take advantage of cloud Azure” and “exploit Azure SQL.”
LexisNexis, I salute you!
This might seem like a small thing, but it’s a critical step in many modernisation journeys. By embracing PaaS, they’re helping to remove barriers to Cloud adoption, which - understandably - can sometimes be seen as an expensive option when that support is lacking.
If more vendors took a similar approach, they might just retain their customers - and stay competitive in a Cloud-first world.
Leon Fox
CTO
Shaping Cloud
leon@shapingcloud.com