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Cloud Computing: IaaS Offers Few Cost Savings, but Provides Greater Agility
“Cloud [computing] has three technological aspects — infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and finally software-as-a-service (SaaS),” says Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at analyst firm Gartner.
Gartner calls Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) the “computing” part of “cloud computing,” and considers it the most basic and fundamental form of cloud computing service. Currently there is no “one size fits all” IaaS, and no single provider successfully addresses all segments of the market. The IaaS market is poised for strong growth with worldwide IaaS is expected to grow from $3.7 billion in 2011 to $10.5 billion in 2014. NetworkWorld notes that “Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) has more than 30 major players, both pure-play outfits that provide pay as you go, on-demand compute services, and those rising into the cloud from the traditional managed services realm.”
Lydia Leong, research Vice President at Gartner, recently issued Gartner’s first IaaS Magic Quadrant report for IaaS and also blogged about her findings. Some of the findings of the IaaS report include:
- Companies adopting IaaS really don’t save money, but they gain more agility in their operations.
- IT Operations are becoming increasingly automated. Those same new automated capabilities are showing up in IaaS offerings, so IaaS is more than just self-service provisioning.
- SLA agreements for IaaS lack comprehensiveness. Most covernetwork availability, but most don’t address compute and storage performance
- Few IaaS vendors currently currently offer availability and performance monitoring, something that is likely to change
- Few IaaS vendors use a standardized architecture across their public and private cloud offerings
Leong comments that “We are still at the beginning of the adoption cycle for cloud computing IaaS.”
