The current trends around Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

According to Gartner analysts, public cloud spending will have grown by 20.7% in 2023, to nearly $592 billion globally – up 18.8% on 2022 spending.

Cloud computing covers a vast range of products and services. In simple terms, it’s the delivery of servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics and intelligence over the Internet (‘cloud’) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources and economies of scale.

Serverless architecture within an enterprise’s infrastructure eliminates the barriers faced by traditional IT infrastructure. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is one such offering in the cloud computing arena.

What is IaaS?

IaaS provides direct access to cloud servers and storage, enabling more flexibility, scalability and networking layers.  With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure – servers and virtual machines, storage, networks or operating systems – from a cloud provider on demand, on a pay-as-you-go basis. It’s ideal for organisations that use specialised or unique proprietary applications, but don’t want to spend time or other resources buying, storing, setting up or maintaining the necessary equipment. Instead, they access ready-to-use infrastructure over the internet.

IaaS is the driver of cloud market growth

Infrastructure as a Service is forecast to see a 29.8% increase in demand from 2022 to 2023. This is primarily driven by IT infrastructure modernisation projects initiated by organisations to minimise risks and optimise costs through CAPEX savings.

Rise in cloud adoption across several industry verticals such as banking, financial services and insurance, government and education, healthcare, IT and telecoms, retail, manufacturing and media will accelerate IaaS market growth even further.

North America was the largest region in the IaaS market in 2022, with Western Europe being the second largest region. Several industries are adopting IaaS owing to the benefits such as low cost and improved reliability and scalability. The banking sector is one such area with a higher rate of IaaS adoption due to the substantial benefits including data analytics, AI-driven analytics with the machine and deep learning algorithms, agility and scale.

Here are some of the top trends that organisations and IT teams are seeing in the IaaS market.

Hybrid Cloud Adoption

Adopting a hybrid cloud strategy combines public cloud services with private, on-premises infrastructure. This approach allows businesses to leverage the benefits of both environments, such as scalability and flexibility of the public cloud, with security and control of the private cloud.

IaaS providers are catering to this trend by offering seamless integration and management capabilities across different cloud environments. They provide tools and services to enable workload portability, data synchronisation and unified management of resources across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.

Serverless Computing

Serverless computing is gaining popularity within the IaaS landscape. It enables IT developers to focus on writing code, leaving the cloud provider to manage the underlying infrastructure. This model allows for easier scalability and cost optimisation, as you only pay for the actual computing resources used during deployment.

IaaS solutions can help manage back-end services that support serverless applications, for example, deploying databases, caching systems or message queues on virtual machines. As the number of function executions increases, the IaaS platform can automatically scale the underlying infrastructure to handle the workload.

Some legacy applications or systems may not be easily converted to serverless architecture. In such cases, organisations can use IaaS to maintain and run these applications while building new functionalities using serverless computing. IaaS offers more customisation and control over the infrastructure compared to serverless computing.

Edge Computing

As the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G networks become more prevalent, edge computing is emerging as a trend within IaaS. Edge computing brings data processing closer to the data source, reducing latency and improving real-time analysis, making it ideal for applications requiring low-latency responses.

When IaaS is combined with edge computing, it creates a hybrid infrastructure that extends the capabilities of traditional cloud computing to the network edge. Organisations can run virtual machines or containers to perform data processing and analytics tasks on data generated at the edge, reducing the need to transfer large amounts of data to central cloud data centres.

Reputable IaaS providers like Securus have a network of data centres, ensuring redundancy and high availability of edge computing resources.

Machine Learning & AI Integration

Cloud providers are now integrating machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) services into their IaaS offerings. They offer pre-built ML models, APIs and frameworks for tasks like natural language processing, image recognition and predictive analytics. These services enable developers to integrate ML and AI functionality into their applications without having to build and train models from scratch.

Kubernetes & Containerisation

Containerisation, particularly using technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, has revolutionised application deployment and management. IaaS providers are offering container orchestration services, simplifying the deployment and scaling of containerised applications.

When Kubernetes and containerisation are used with IaaS, it creates a powerful cloud-native environment. Kubernetes abstracts the underlying infrastructure, allowing containerised applications to run consistently across various IaaS providers and on-premises environments. This portability reduces vendor lock-in and increases flexibility.

IaaS platforms also provide the necessary resources to scale the Kubernetes cluster and containerised applications dynamically. This elasticity ensures that applications can handle varying workloads efficiently.

The benefits of IaaS

Migrating your organisation’s infrastructure to IaaS helps to reduce maintenance of on-premises data centres, saves money on hardware costs and enables real-time business insights.

IaaS solutions give you the flexibility to scale your IT resources up and down with demand, whilst bypassing the cost and complexity of buying and managing physical servers and data centre infrastructure.

1. Elimination of Downtime

Consumer tolerance for application downtime is diminishing rapidly, meaning that IT teams will not accept highly manual, unreliable application protection. Reputable IaaS providers implement high availability (HA) architectures in their data centres, ensuring that critical services, such as networking, storage, and compute, have redundant components that automatically take over in case of hardware failures. IaaS platforms offer automated failover mechanisms that detect failures in virtual machines or services and automatically switch to redundant instances in the event of an outage.

2. Cost Savings

IaaS eliminates the need for upfront capital expenditures on hardware and infrastructure. You  only pay for the resources you consume on a pay-as-you-go model, leading to cost savings and greater financial flexibility.

3. Speed & Scalability

IaaS providers offer serverless platforms that automatically scale resources based on demand, enabling developers to build applications without worrying about infrastructure management.

The visibility that IaaS affords allows IT teams to focus on the most important data. They can build in automation to optimise the cloud infrastructure, expanding when a spike occurs, then going back to normal when it drops. This elasticity not only keeps costs in check, but it also enables companies to handle fluctuating workloads efficiently without overprovisioning or experiencing performance bottlenecks.

4. Data Accessibility & Governance

Companies now demand best-of-breed cloud capabilities with their increasingly diverse and distributed data sets. Many are shifting to a decentralised approach with IaaS: instead of bringing the data to the application, they are extending the reach of those cloud capabilities to where the data lies for added control and flexibility.  

Managing data across multiple locations, from edge to core, in a multi-cloud environment can create challenges with governance, quality and access. IaaS offers consistent, secure and distributed access to a single data set.

How Securus can help

These trends in IaaS reflect the evolving needs of organisations for scalable, flexible and efficient cloud infrastructure and development platforms. IaaS provides all the infrastructure to support web apps, including storage, web and application servers and networking resources.

Securus owns a private cloud infrastructure across three separate data centres, offering up 100% uptime across the estate. We can therefore help you quickly deploy web apps on IaaS and easily scale infrastructure up and down when demand requires.

Please do get in touch with our infrastructure experts on 03451 283457 to discuss your cloud computing requirements in more detail.