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SURVEY: Speed, agility top reasons for implementing IaaS

By Suzanne Franco, Surveys Editorial Project Manager at ITWeb.
Johannesburg, 20 Jul 2017
Hemant Bhoola, director of sales consulting for technology at Oracle.
Hemant Bhoola, director of sales consulting for technology at Oracle.

An Oracle-ITWeb survey reveals agility is the most compelling reason for organisations when deciding on adopting Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Conducted online during March, the survey set out to assess IaaS adoption trends in SA.

Besides agility, which was identified as a key benefit by a third of respondents, cost savings (32%) and elasticity of the infrastructure service (29%) were also important considerations.

Commenting on the trends identified by the IaaS survey, Hemant Bhoola, director of sales consulting for technology at Oracle, says IaaS allows customers to go to market faster.

"Being able to access a secure and scalable infrastructure helps customers to run any workload in the cloud for instant added value and productivity for their business."

Measure, then improve

It also emerged from the survey that 63% of respondents cited management capabilities of the IaaS system as very important.

"Peter Drucker said if you can't measure it, you can't improve it," says Bhoola.

"Managing cloud capabilities allows customers to get improved services. The time has come for an organisation to be able to access a suite of next-generation integrated monitoring, management and analytics cloud services that leverage machine learning and big data techniques against the full breadth of the operational dataset.

Cloud management services also help customers improve IT stability, prevent application outages, increase DevOps agility and harden security across their entire application and infrastructure portfolio, he says.

"With efficient cloud management, you can eliminate disparate silos across end-user and infrastructure data, troubleshoot problems quickly, and run IT like a business."

When it comes to the preferred cost models, exactly half of the respondents said they are interested in metered services (pay for what you use). A further 27% would rather opt for an un-metered service (unlimited use during the term of contract).

Commenting on this finding, Bhoola points out that metered services are recommended for customers able to predict their required usage. "Metered service is a prepaid offering, and also referred to as a 'committed' offering. A metered cloud service, like IaaS, is where you're charged based on the actual usage of the service resources on an hourly or monthly basis.

"A metered service allows the cloud customer to select resource configurations for a service and virtually for any volume or capacity to meet their requirements.

"Customers can change their service capacity as needed and that will accordingly increase or decrease their bill."

Data sovereignty

For 50% of respondents concerns over data sovereignty are the stumbling block to adopting IaaS cloud.

Bhoola explains that "data sovereignty is where information which has been converted and stored in binary digital form is subject to the laws of the country in which it's located."

"Some customers may be forced to retain and keep data in a country. IaaS allows customers to run services in their own data centre. Customers can now leverage the latest innovations for the rapid development that cloud provides, all while meeting any data sovereignty and residence requirements."

The survey also revealed cost is the most important differentiator for IaaS (38%), while 25% cited performance, and 15% chose management.

As one would expect, an overwhelming majority (84%) of participants indicated the ability to rapidly scale up and down is an important quality of IaaS.

"Cloud consumers can select a shape that meets the requirements of their workloads with a sufficient buffer for intermittent spikes in the load," notes Bhoola. "If you're not sure what shape is appropriate, then start small, experiment with a representative workload, and then settle on a shape. This approach may help you achieve an optimal trade-off between resource allocation and performance."

He advises organisations to choose a service provider that gives customers a complete choice between SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.

About the survey

The 2017 IaaS Survey was run online on ITWeb for a period of two weeks in March to assess IaaS adoption trends and strategies of SA organisations. It set out to determine:

1 Why organisations are adopting IaaS;
2 What are the most important factors driving or inhibiting adoption;
3 What are the preferred cost models and contract terms?

Who responded

* A total of 116 valid responses were received for the IaaS Survey.
* 18% of respondents are CEOs or MDs and 29% IT middle managers.
* 8% of respondents are from large companies with between 501-5000 employees and 15% are from multinationals with over 10 000 employees.

Speed, agility top reasons for implementing IaaS
Speed, agility top reasons for implementing IaaS
Speed, agility top reasons for implementing IaaS
Speed, agility top reasons for implementing IaaS
Speed, agility top reasons for implementing IaaS
Speed, agility top reasons for implementing IaaS
Speed, agility top reasons for implementing IaaS
Speed, agility top reasons for implementing IaaS

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