Infrastructure as a Service adoption continues to grow

With more companies, especially small businesses, looking to shift workloads to the cloud, they must make the decision between platform-, software- and infrastructure-as-a-service models for their cloud deployments. According to research by Global Industry Analysts, enterprise IaaS has the clear lead, as many companies are adopting these services when they enter the cloud.

“Infrastructure-as-a-Service is emerging into a critical business model crucial to survival of enterprises in the 21st century,” the market research firm stated in a press release. “IaaS provides the prefect platform to cost-effectively optimize enterprise work processes by allowing essential IT resources such as storage, processing power, security and network bandwidth to be hired and/or rented as a service over the internet.”

The benefits of these services seem to be the perfect remedy for small businesses, as they don’t normally have the funds to continue investment in data center hardware. IaaS allows those businesses to compete by providing a cost-effective solution while offering big businesses benefits such as scalability and security.

Companies also seem to using private cloud deployments over public clouds due to security reasons. Public cloud providers are having a difficult time ensuring the security measures needed by businesses. This has led to around 70 percent of businesses moving to private clouds, where everything on the cloud belongs to them, allowing for more control and monitoring.

Monitoring capabilities important when selecting IaaS provider
With data security a main issue when it comes to storage in the cloud, it is imperative for businesses to be able to monitor their infrastructure. According to a Techworld blog post penned by the Opsview Development Team, oversight of cloud deployments is essential to making sure a company is getting the most out of the service.

A survey conducted by Opsview recently found that around 35 percent of businesses will be looking to adopt an IaaS provider in the near future. Yet, there are still concerns that need to be accounted for when purchasing a service.

For example, security is the top issue for companies looking to move to the cloud, with 56 percent of the respondents stating they were worried about it. Going hand-in-hand with security is data control, which was cited as a substantial concern by 14 percent of the survey’s participants

Simply monitoring these systems can assuage any fears associated with these two concerns. This is where having private cloud IaaS service can be handy, as the cloud is reserved only for a specific business, and tools are provided to monitor and maintain the cloud.