5 Lessons from the IaaS Pioneers

By: Sunil Mehra, Vice President – Cloud Platform, Oracle India

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) has been around for less than a decade, but the market is evolving fast. As interest in the technology grows, we want to understand how the pioneers of IaaS have found their transition to the technology. Is IaaS living up to expectations? Do they have any regrets?

The results of our survey of 1,600 senior IT professionals tell us that the pioneers are not looking back. They have embraced IaaS, overcome the teething problems, and laid the groundwork for others to follow

1) IaaS is key to innovation and agility- All businesses—whatever their sector, wherever they are in the world—are under huge pressure to drive innovation and disrupt their markets. Many are using IaaS to respond to this pressure. Just over six in ten (62%) say IaaS makes it easier to innovate. Among our pioneers, this conviction is even more prevalent: 68% believe in the innovative advantages of IaaS. And IaaS is linked to agility—a crucial attribute in a fast-changing world—with 60% of respondents saying that moving to IaaS has significantly cut their time to deployment.

2) IaaS boosts performance- Businesses that make IaaS the cornerstone of their enterprise IT see a clear improvement in system performance. Around half of businesses (47%) say IaaS improves their systems’ availability and uptime. A similar proportion say it makes their infrastructure faster. And the longer a business works with IaaS, the better that performance becomes. The pioneers are much more likely to believe in the benefits of IaaS than recent adopters—56%  versus 45% say it provides better availability and uptime, and 52% versus 47% say it improves speed.

3) Adoption is easier-To date, the top two challenges faced by businesses when adopting IaaS have been cost and data security. Now, organizations are getting better at overcoming these obstacles. Our pioneers, who have seen the full benefits of IaaS play out over time, are less likely than recent adopters to say that cost has been a challenge. Two-thirds (67 percent) of this group also believe IaaS has significantly cut maintenance costs. The pioneers are also more comfortable with security—instead of a security risk, they see IaaS as a security opportunity: almost six in ten (58 percent) say IaaS represents best practice security for enterprise architecture.

4) Resistance is less common-In the past, executives looking to move their infrastructure to the cloud ran into resistance from colleagues. There were concerns about complexity, obsolescence and loss of control. But those fears are receding. While 54% of the pioneers (those who began integrating IaaS in 2012 or before) have been challenged by colleagues about increased complexity, just 43% of recent adopters (those who have adopted it within the past year) have encountered such concerns. It’s a similar story for fears about technological change (54% versus 47%) and loss of control (52% versus 46%). Executives are discovering that IaaS is now more flexible and compatible as a new wave of suppliers provides better solutions.

5) Now’s the time for IaaS adoption- Our survey makes two things clear; the barriers to IaaS are falling, and the benefits are becoming clearer. With ever-more sophisticated solutions appearing, it’s no surprise that businesses are seizing the IaaS opportunity. In our research, we find 44% of businesses aiming to base all or almost all of their infrastructure on IaaS within the next three years. In total,77% expect to be using IaaS to some extent in the same timeframe. The pioneers have shown the way—and the rest of the business world is hot on their heels.