Yankee Group: Infrastructure as a Service now a bona fide cloud strategy

Infrastructure as a Service, one of the three siblings of the triumvirate that forms cloud as we know it (along with Software as a Service and Platform as a Service), is now in use or being considered by six out of ten companies engaged in cloud computing, a new Yankee Group survey finds.

The survey of 400 enterprises finds "24 percent of large enterprises with cloud experience" are already using IaaS, and an additional 37 percent expect to adopt IaaS during the next 24 months. "While adoption is still much slower than that of SaaS solutions, the market is gaining traction," says Yankee.

Hmm. Not clear on whether the segment of enterprises "with cloud experience" is actually a smaller group, or is fairly pervasive these days. We could be talking about 24 percent of 50 percent of the total that have "cloud experience" -- or 12 percent of the total that have IaaS. So let's hold off on the IaaS-is-mainstream celebration until this is cleared up. (A six-page slideshow is available here with some more data and details on cloud computing decisions.)

Interestingly, only about a third of the respondents see cloud as a potential internal IT platform. And Yankee finds that storage and on-demand computing are top IaaS use cases. Cloud is a "second-tier storage alternative," the report notes.

Yankee defines IaaS as "a pool of shared computing resources, including servers and storage, that are available and scalable on demand. These resources can be provided in a shared, public multi-tenanted or dedicated private basis."

The number one barrier to IaaS, the report states, is virtualization security. However, those that have already deployed IaaS say other issues come to the fore, including regulatory compliance, data migration, reliability, employee use and quantitative benefits higher.