The Growing Use of IaaS

Enterprises of all sizes are increasingly embracing the cloud-based service model. That's because it provides them with agile, self-service, on-demand access to a much richer range of services and applications at a lower cost than was traditionally available.  One of the primary components of the overall cloud-based services market is the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market.  Given the growing interest that IT organizations have in IaaS solutions, we decided to analyze this market.  My next four TechNotes will report on our findings.

We distributed a survey to IT professionals who are subscribers of Webtorials as part of our analysis of IaaS. We also interviewed an enterprise architect for a multi-national, Fortune 50 company to add context to the survey results.

The initial set of IaaS solutions that were brought to market by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) were the basic computing and storage services that are necessary to run applications.  However, the IaaS market is highly dynamic and IaaS providers are deploying myriad new services including:

• Disaster Recovery
• Virtual Private Data Centers
• High Performance Computing

Current and Planned Adoption of IaaS Services

The survey respondents were asked to indicate the IaaS services that their organization currently acquires from a CSP. They were also asked what services their organization will likely acquire from a CSP during the next year.  Their responses are shown in the following table.

Storage and computing were the initial set of IaaS services that were brought to market.  So it was not at all surprising to see that over a quarter of the survey respondents indicated that they are currently using those services.  In addition, given that high performance computing (HPC) is somewhat of a niche application, you would expect there would be relatively little interest in acquiring HPC from an IaaS supplier.  It was, however, somewhat of a surprise to see the strong interest in both virtual private data center and disaster recovery services.  

The enterprise architect said that his company uses cloud-based IaaS solutions such as computing and storage services because he can get these services faster than they can be provisioned internally.  As he put it, "You absolutely pay less for these services than you would if they were implemented internally."  He also talked about the importance of another advantage of these services. "If I don't want them in six months, I can get rid of them."  When asked about the relative importance of cost savings vs. becoming more agile, the enterprise architect stated that, "They are both important, but agility is a bit more important."