New platform as a service (PaaS) offerings will play an integral role in the development, security and delivery of mobile applications. PaaS enables companies to develop, run and manage applications without building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with creating and launching an app. It can also provide support for specific functions, such as location-based services.
These mobile cloud services can support app development by offering the following:
Infrastructure to run and scale mobile apps. Many companies have purchased cloud infrastructure to quickly turn on short-term development and test environments for distributed app teams and partners. Organizations can extend this concept to mobile development by purchasing compute infrastructure, storage and servers as a service that can scale as a company’s mobile apps needs grow. They can also buy network services such as load balancing and content delivery networks to ensure that mobile applications and associated services are always available and highly responsive despite spikes in usage.