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By Mark Henricks
Enthusiasm for Infrastructure-as-a-Service is gathering
steam among businesses, but holdouts still outnumber users, and significant
obstacles still have to be overcome, according to a recent Yankee Group Survey. The survey, “Is IaaS Moving Beyond Just Cloud Fluff?” found
that 24 percent of large corporations with previous cloud experience had
implemented IaaS. Among the majority who are either not interested or have yet
to start using IaaS, the big concern was virtualization security.
The number of cloud-experienced companies already using IaaS
is surprisingly large, although, Yankee noted, it still lags far behind those
using SaaS. But a larger and probably more significant percentage of those
surveyed -- 37 percent -- is planning to implement IaaS in the next two years,
the survey found. Together with the group already using IaaS, that indicates a
majority of companies currently buying cloud services will be customers for
IaaS some time in the next 24 months.
IaaS is the highest
layer of services offered in the cloud hierarchy. Users pay a provider for
access to virtual servers, storage and networks, on which they are able to
deploy and run operating systems and applications of their choice. It allows companies to avoid hardware and
software investments, in return for paying usage fees. An example of an IaaS
provider is Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2.
While the IaaS trend would appear to be gathering speed,
based on this survey, survey author Sandra Palumbo also noted that 16 percent
of companies surveyed had no plans to implement IaaS at this time. The surveyed
group consisted of 400 U.S. IT decision-makers who were asked 53 questions
about cloud computing as part of Yankee’s “Anywhere Enterprise: 2010 U.S. Cloud
Computing FastView Survey.”
The questions included some intended to find out what was
keeping companies from embracing IaaS, as well as who they would be likely to
choose as suppliers should they decided to try it. Among those who had yet to
buy IaaS, the primary obstacle consisted of concerns about virtualization
security. However, those who were already using IaaS said bigger issues were
regulatory compliance, data migration, reliability, employee use and
quantitative benefits. Palumbo said these results suggested that prospective
users tended to misperceive the benefits and issues of IaaS.
Telecom providers were the preferred provider most commonly
cited by respondents who had already adopted IaaS. Thirty-three percent of the
IaaS early adopters said telecom companies were the best positioned to offer
the service. However, among all cloud adopters systems integrators were said to
be their most trusted partners for cloud computing.
Another finding of the FastView survey was that most
enterprises would prefer to use a private or internal cloud computing network
rather than a public or virtually public networks. The issue in this case was
concern about security and privacy. That result was in line with another recent
survey, this one by IDC, that found roughly three-quarters of organizations had
or were considering implementing private cloud strategies.
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