More than two thirds of respondents in a survey from Oracle said they see infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as ‘fundamental’ to progressive cloud strategies – up 8% in the past quarter.
The study, the second in a series, polled 1,610 IT professionals across nine countries and three continents and found a combination of new services coming to market and the growing maturity of existing cloud deployments led to the increase.
An overwhelming 94% of respondents say they had adopted IaaS – again up 8% from the previous quarter – while two in three (66%) argue businesses not investing in IaaS will find themselves struggling to keep up with those who are.
When it came to benefits, enhanced security was cited by more than half (52%) of those polled. Apart from that it was the usual routine; improved productivity (cited by 56% of respondents), greater system speed (50%) and reduced operating costs (48%) were all seen as key.
If one problem persists, it is around the dreaded skills gap. More than a quarter (28%) of companies say IT skills shortages have been one of their biggest issues in rolling out IaaS – up from 21% in the previous quarter.
Yet the takeaway is simple: adopt IaaS or you will soon fall significantly behind. “Investments in cloud infrastructure are clearly paying off for businesses and we are seeing that very strongly in the UK,” said Jason Rees, senior director of Oracle Cloud Foundation Technologies in a statement.
“The UK is a diverse and inspiring business market, comprising of businesses from innovative startups to large traditional multinationals. What they have in common is cloud computing is helping them get where they need to go faster, whether they are chasing scale, or undergoing a reinvention for the digital economy,” Rees added.
“Their ambitions are being powered by the agility cloud infrastructure offers.”
As regular readers of this publication will be aware, Oracle has made significant recent announcements as it pushes its cloudy ethos. Earlier this month chairman and CTO Larry Ellison officially unveiled the company’s autonomous database, putting a few barbs Amazon’s way in the process. “This is the most important thing we have done in a long, long time,” said Ellison. “For years and years artificial intelligence did not live up to its promise, but there is a new type of AI… the first branch of artificial intelligence that really, really works.”
You can find out more about the Oracle research here.