How Can We Satisfy the Cloud Needs of SaaS?
As a software as a service (SaaS) provider, does this ring true for you?
The main thorn in our side was that our cloud costs became very difficult to predict and control. At the same time, support was increasingly lacking, and delivering subsecond application responses to our customers remained a challenge."
That is from Rajkumar Ganapathy, CTO of Zolvit, a provider of a SaaS-based solution to hundreds of thousands of companies in the legal services industry.
Unfortunately, this is a common refrain from the SaaS companies my team and I work with.
How is it possible that more than a decade in, the cloud revolution has become filled with these challenges? Wasn’t this revolution designed to solve them?
When our leadership announced the acquisition of Linode and shared their rationale for the purchase, the team and I sat up straighter and you could almost hear the gears clicking as we considered the possibilities for our customers. A new, cloud-native approach to delivering SaaS applications can simultaneously address cost and performance needs.
Could we use Linode’s pricing model for our customer’s benefit?
Fast-forward and our announcement of Akamai Connected Cloud last month answered with a definitive yes. Especially for egress-heavy applications, our cloud services give customers more transparent and predictable pricing, even for those apps that are “bursty” in nature. More than that, our unique architecture means we can pass our cost savings on to the customer. Raj again:
We have cut our costs in half. With reduced egress fees and zero commitments, we can avoid costs that we were previously subjected to without control. Budgeting has become far more simple, and gone are the days of tense after-the-fact conversations with our finance department.”
Can we compliment our customers' existing cloud investments?
As companies expand their SaaS offerings and focus on supporting their customers globally, getting as close to the end user with cloud computing has become an increasing need and challenge. Addressing a multitude of changing local data privacy laws while spinning up local cloud computing infrastructure is quickly becoming a daunting task.
Akamai is known for having the most distributed and secure network in very remote and underserved regions of the world. We believe this strategic advantage brings value to our customers by allowing them to support these underserved markets quickly and cost-effectively.
Can we deliver better performance?
Akamai was born as a performance company. We built our platform on the premise that wider distribution, closer to the end user, would yield better performance. Twenty-five years later, we’re expanding that premise to cloud infrastructure and it’s never been more validated. Here’s another SaaS provider we support:
Reaching the customer becomes of paramount importance to us, which means that we need to provide solutions that can reach them in subseconds. When workflows get moved to Akamai’s edge, customers tend to get subsecond responses from the applications, which means it's incredibly easy for them to use our digital workflows.”
Can we do all this and keep it simple?
When Akamai created the concept of a content delivery network (CDN), we had to build a lot of custom code and, over time, our customers rightly asked, “Hey, can you open up the black box and make yourself more extensible to my DevOps team?”
We’ve come a long way since then and have now entered the market with the most distributed cloud platform in the world, one that’s developer-friendly and requires no specialized training or certifications or proprietary tools. In fact, our goal is to simplify even the connectivity and plumbing that’s forcing workloads into a small number or regions and is missing out on being truly distributed.
Our cloud computing solutions are open source, well-documented, and brilliantly served and supported by specialists with decades of cloud delivery and security experience. What does that mean in reality? You can build and deploy applications quickly, close to your end users, which gives you increased performance and faster speed to market in a highly secure way. Here’s another customer:
My engineers spun it up in, well, less than a half a day, and it felt very intuitive and very easy to use.”
Is our hunch about vendor lock-in correct?
Finally, our cloud computing services help our customers free themselves from vendor lock-in. That means you can be confident that any workloads you deploy in Akamai’s cloud won’t force you to use custom, unrepeatable technology. Here’s Rajkumar Ganapathy again:
My advice for any businesses operating in the cloud is to stay away from proprietary solutions as much as possible. In the beginning, it might appear easier and less time-consuming, but using proprietary solutions leads to vendor lock-in, making it difficult for you to use your own tools or switch to another provider.”
What does the future hold?
Our roadmap is robust and visionary. Adding new regions and integrating existing ones into our single global platform is a priority that will enable customers to take advantage of a truly distributed compute platform. Feature-wise, expect to see the security, capacity, resilience, and compliance that you expect from Akamai.
We have more than two dozen companies going through our Qualified Technology Partner process, and we’re already seeing amazing traction. The team and I can’t wait to chat with you. We have a hunch you will find that first conversation intriguing.
Find out more
Read about the debut of Akamai Connected Cloud, and learn more about Akamai’s cloud computing services running on Akamai Connected Cloud.
Questions?
