Infrastructure as a service is one of the fastest growing paradigms in the portfolio of cloud-based services. Here are the five reasons why IaaS is set to grow to become a $4 billion market by 2015.
Just as software as a service shifted software from being an enterprise asset that is licensed to being a service that is provided, and platform as a service shifted software development and hosting capabilities for specific computer architectures from being an asset purchased en masse to being a service provided on demand, infrastructure as a service allows all enterprise hardware architectures to be virtualized, including processors, storage, firewalls and other network resources.
Besides the savings in capital expenditures associated with building large data centers, IaaS reduces the labor costs of maintaining 24/7 network administrators, and greatly reduces the energy power budget for an enterprise. IaaS is delivered by platform virtualization where servers, software, data center space, and network equipment are outsourced to cloud service providers.
According to In-Stat, IaaS is destined to grow quickly over the next four years, culminating in a $4 billion market by 2015, with the top five markets being hospitality, food, health care, social services and retail.
Here are the five reasons that IaaS is destined to skyrocket:
Cloud-bursting: Without IaaS, enterprises must invest in servers that run at 10 percent of capacity 90 percent of the time, just so they can handle the bursts in activity that occur only 10 percent of the time. By off-loading these bursts to cloud-based services, substantial savings in capital expenditures can be reaped by an enterprise.
Virtualization: Virtualization is the process of running low-level code beneath operating systems, rather than using separate load balancers as would otherwise be needed. Virtualization manages failover, redundancy, monitoring, clustering and other infrastructure management tasks.
Hypervisor Convenience: IaaS combines hardware and software resources by virtue of low-level code, called a hypervisor, that runs independent any chosen operating system. The convenience of the hypervisor involves its taking inventory of hardware resources and allocating them based on demand.
Resource Pooling: IaaS software works by running virtualization code--the hypervisor--to allocate hardware resources on-demand, thereby enabling resource pooling among departments of an enterprise.
Multi-tenant Computing: Because of the resource pooling made possible by virtualization of resources, organizations with similar interests in regard to security requirements and compliance can share resources, called multi-tenant computing.
These five areas will be the drivers that bring IaaS to new levels in the next few years.
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