More than half of respondents in a survey from Oracle say moving to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has significantly cut their time to deploy new applications and services, while three in five claim it is easier to innovate through it.
The study, conducted alongside Longitude Research and which surveyed more than 1,600 IT professionals across nine countries, also found IaaS had significantly cut ongoing maintenance costs for a majority (54%) of those polled.
Naturally, the more organisations are using IaaS, the more confident they are of its success. 56% of experienced users agreed with the statement that IaaS ‘provides world-class availability and uptime’, compared with 49% of established users, 45% of recent adopters, and only 29% of non-adopters. For the statement ‘IaaS provides world-class speed’, it was similar, with 52% of experienced users and 25% of non-adopters respectively.
When it came to more negative perceptions surrounding IaaS, the UK came out on top. 57% of respondents grumbled that IaaS was ‘not secure enough for most critical data’, compared to only 39% in Germany, while 55% and 43% respectively were concerned over losing control of on-premises systems.
“When it comes to cloud adoption, there has always been a case of perception lagging behind reality,” said James Stanbridge, vice president of IaaS product management at Oracle. “Cloud is still relatively new to a lot of businesses and some outdated perceptions persist.
“We are now seeing high levels of success and satisfaction from businesses that are saving money, cutting complexity and driving exciting innovation thanks to cloud infrastructure,” Stanbridge added. “Those resisting the move need to challenge the perceptions holding them back because the longer they wait, the further ahead their competitors will pull.”
The push for Oracle towards IaaS will not be a huge surprise given the company has said it is an important focus for them. Speaking to analysts following the impressive $1.36 billion cloud quarter results last week, Larry Ellison said that during the current fiscal year, the company expects both its IaaS and PaaS (platform as a service) businesses to ‘accelerate into hyper growth’. SaaS revenue hit $964 million in the most recent quarter, compared to PaaS and IaaS with $397m.
You can read the report here (UK-centric).