Nuon Emerges to Makes Porting SaaS Applications to Other Clouds Simpler

Nuon this week emerged from stealth to provide early access to a bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) platform that leverages containers and other cloud-native technologies to make it simpler to move software-as-a-service (SaaS) application software into a virtual private cloud (VPC) or on-premises IT environment.

Fresh off raising $16.5 million in funding. Nuon CEO Jon Morehouse said Nuon provides a platform through which existing infrastructure-as-code, application code and containers can be ported into another cloud environment using a “runner” that Nuon enables. It then allows the provider of a SaaS application to centrally manage that instance of its software even though it is being accessed via a cloud account that belongs to the end customer.

Scheduled to become generally available in the first quarter of 2025, that approach provides organizations with more control over their data in addition to making it simpler to comply with data sovereignty mandates.

In effect, Nuon is making it possible for organizations to require SaaS application providers to provide a bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) option for organizations that are no longer comfortable with sharing infrastructure with other organizations using that same SaaS application.

It’s not clear how many organizations are going to want to pursue that option, but as the number of outages of cloud services continues to increase, there is an argument to be made for becoming less dependent on a single point of failure.

In addition, more organizations want more control over their data in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Much of the data stored in SaaS applications is going to be needed to train and custom AI models.

The one certain thing is the SaaS first era of IT is coming to a close, said Morehouse. More organizations want to keep their options open at a time when there is a much greater appreciation for the value of data.

Longer term, Nuon plans to find ways to give end customers more control over where they run applications, said Morehouse. In the last year, there has been a significant amount of repatriation of cloud applications as organizations realize that at a certain level of scale, it can become less expensive to deploy applications in an on-premises IT environment. One way or another, IT environments are becoming more distributed as organizations become more comfortable with managing multiple clouds.

Of course, many of the SaaS applications in use today were adopted at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, many organizations have sought to rationalize the number of SaaS applications they currently employ as part of a larger effort to rescue IT costs.

Regardless of motivation, there is no doubt that more organizations will be revisiting their SaaS application strategy. That may not result in wholesale migrations, but for those organizations that do decide they want to at the very least move off the infrastructure a SaaS application provider is using, they now have another option to consider.