Infrastructure as a Service

1. Summary

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is one of the key cloud computing delivery models dealing with on-demand compute, storage, and networking resources. Initially, IaaS providers targeted startups and small and medium businesses that preferred a self-service mechanism for provisioning the resources. During the last five years, the IaaS market has evolved to meet the business requirements of enterprises. Today, Fortune 100 companies from various industry verticals, public sector companies, and governments are adopting IaaS. The current IaaS market comprises of pure-play infrastructure companies, telecom providers, traditional enterprise software vendors, and datacenter providers.

Customers must consider multiple factors while choosing the right IaaS platform for their business needs. Enterprises have varied requirements ranging from the ability to run legacy applications, integration with existing infrastructure, deploying cloud-native applications, and running Big Data workloads. It is important to understand that a mature IaaS offering goes beyond provisioning virtual machines in the cloud.

This report attempts to analyze the IaaS market landscape with an objective of helping CXOs choose the right IaaS offering. It highlights the key attributes of an enterprise infrastructure service while assessing the capabilities and maturity of public cloud IaaS vendors against each of the attributes.