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Public cloud adoption has moved beyond the testing and development phase in many companies, according to a study of 243 IT and business professionals in North American and Western Europe. The study, commissioned by virtualization specialist VMware and conducted by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), found 67 percent of the midmarket and enterprise companies surveyed are running what they view as mission-critical workloads on infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The survey included organizations that are currently using public cloud services, with a focus on IaaS.
The survey found more than 80 percent of IaaS customers surveyed are running production workloads on IaaS, and 70 percent of current IaaS customers use cloud storage services. This was followed by 58 percent of respondents who are using cloud servers, while 53 percent are leveraging disaster recovery services using IaaS. More than three-quarters (78 percent) of respondents reported that it was also important that their cloud service providers’ infrastructure technologies were compatible with their internal private cloud /virtualized data center.
“The study demonstrates that IaaS from cloud service providers is seeing broad adoption by mainstream business for business-critical applications and data, moving beyond test and development,” Mathew Lodge, VMware’s vice president of cloud services, said in a statement. “As IaaS adoption grows, so does the importance of strong customer service and support as well as the quality of the underlying technology. Compatibility with existing virtualized data centers and private clouds was also key.”
In addition, 83 percent of respondents indicated the underlying technology used to deliver IaaS was of some level of importance to them, with nearly half citing it as a very important or critical factor when considering IaaS. Service and support topped a list of criteria for selecting cloud service providers with 80 percent of respondents citing it as important, with a quarter of the respondents indicating total cost of ownership (TCO) was the single most important criteria for service provider selection.
As the most basic cloud service model, IaaS providers offer computers as physical or more often as virtual machines among other resources. The virtual machines are run as guests by a hypervisor, and the management of pools of hypervisors by the cloud operational support system allows for the ability to scale support to a large number of virtual machines. Other resources in IaaS clouds include images in a virtual machine image library, raw (block) and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs) and software bundles.