IaaS Adoption Exploding with Plenty of Room to Grow

Adoption of public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has more than doubled over the past two years, but it still has plenty of room to grow even further. As IT organizations get comfortable with cloud-provider security measures and are willing to give up control of the infrastructure, we expect more companies to jump into the IaaS deep end during the next few years.

Figure 2 from the full report, IaaS Adoption Trends and Customer Experience, shows that adoption rates and investment rates for IaaS have been strongly and steadily increasing. In just the last three years, adoption has risen from 14% of all organizations in 2014 to 26% in 2016 and 35% in 2017. During the same period, the percentage of organizations making new investments in IaaS has risen from 8% in 2014 to 26% in 2017.

 
The IaaS profile ratings are based on comparisons with 11 other technologies in our Technology Trends 2017 study. The comparisons are on a relative scale, and each technology is categorized as having low, moderate, or high rates relative to other technologies in the study.

“Our research shows that many companies find that IaaS provides a flexible and affordable approach to disaster recovery, archiving of historical data, and increasingly for production systems,” said Tom Dunlap, director of research at Irvine, Calif.-based Computer Economics. “But despite the potential benefits, some companies are still reluctant to trust their computing infrastructure and their data security to public cloud providers. Nevertheless, we expect IaaS growth to accelerate over the coming years, as the benefits become too difficult to leave on the table.”

IaaS refers to the use of public, network-based computing resources such as storage and processing, without having to manage the underlying technical infrastructure. IT organizations make use of IaaS for a variety of purposes, but despite the benefits, many organizations have been reluctant to trust their computing infrastructure to public cloud providers. In some cases there is resistance within the IT organization to moving the infrastructure off-site because of unease over losing control. In other cases, organizations raise security and privacy concerns over trusting the public cloud with confidential information.

The full report quantifies the current adoption and investment trends for public cloud IaaS, as well as the benefits driving adoption and buyer concerns holding it back. We assess adoption and investment trends by organization size, sector, and geography. We also look at the economics of IaaS by assessing the ROI and TCO experience of those that have adopted IaaS and conclude with practical advice for those seeking to gain support for IaaS investments.

This Research Byte is a brief overview of our management advisory on this subject, IaaS Adoption Trends and Customer Experience. The full report is available at no charge for Computer Economics clients, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing).