IaaS: Easy when you know how

By Chris Chelliah

Migrating to cloud infrastructure is far easier than expected, according to the majority of experienced Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) users surveyed by Oracle. But like other cloud technologies before it, IaaS adoption has been held back in some quarters by perception rather than reality. 

The research shows experienced IaaS users are seeing clear benefits. It is the non-adopters who remain doubtful. For example, 56% of established users feel IaaS platforms provide world-class operational performance in terms of availability and uptime, while 71% of non-adopters remain unconvinced.

There are also some splits within businesses. The research tells us the business case for cloud has been made and is being won among senior IT decision-makers, but some closer to the IT coalface are yet to be convinced. For example, senior IT decision-makers are largely agreed that IaaS will improve their company’s data security and overall performance, but developers are less sure. Again, this may owe much to perception as some developers will have been stung by early experiences with cloud infrastructure where the experience did not live up to some vendors’ early promises. Similarly, some early offerings were difficult to integrate with a company’s existing infrastructure. 

Wherever such internal divisions exist, it is important that businesses adopt an enterprise-wide cloud strategy and that they get the whole company bought into shared goals and ambitions, which can now be supported by IaaS infrastructure that will live up to its promises.

Thanks to cloud infrastructure, businesses are seeing high levels of success and satisfaction, from improved innovation to increased agility and flexibility, and such benefits are winning over more and more converts. Businesses are increasingly running their systems on cloud infrastructure and almost half plan to rely on IaaS for most, or all, of their IT infrastructure in the next three years and only a very small minority envisage using no cloud infrastructure within the same time frame. 

Cloud is still relatively new to a lot of businesses and when it comes to adoption, in common with many technologies, there has always been a case of perception lagging behind reality. Those resisting the move need to challenge the perceptions holding them back, because the longer they wait, the further ahead their competitors will pull.

(The writer is Group Vice President & Chief Architect, Core Technology & Cloud, APAC.)