BPM on the Cloud – Are we there yet !

There are now 3 million data centres in the US, and climbing (http://mashable.com/2014/09/30/doe-energy-efficiency/). Data centres are the backbone of cloud services, and the growth in the number of data centres signals the move of computing for large and small companies as well as for startups, from a traditional on-premises setup to the cloud. This shift is at one of the various levels of services offered i.e. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

BPM solutions are no strangers to this paradigm shift and over the period of the last few years, a number of solutions have been introduced that cater to various market needs for cloud based BPM. When businesses choose to exploit the benefits of cloud based BPM, they need to go through a set of decision and analysis to determine if a BPM cloud strategy makes sense to the business.

1. Which BPM applications are candidates for the cloud?

2. What strategy among the various levels of cloud offerings to choose from i.e. IaaS, PaaS or SaaS?

3. How is data security for your BPM applications managed?

In this series of blogs, I will try to outline the steps one could take to maneuver this maze.