Cloud computing is the latest and biggest buzz in the world of computers these days. It is increasingly becoming a vehicle for next generation businesses by providing various innovation platforms and support technologies. From Web-based applications such as Google Docs to ERP database suites, the tools have completely moved to the cloud. The open source renaissance has taken a leap with the rise of cloud and has enabled the army of geographically dispersed computer enthusiasts to develop and learn new cloud techniques.
The public cloud services market is continuing to show high growth rates across all the market segments which marks a shift from legacy IT services to cloud based services. The worldwide cloud services market has grown 18% in 2017 to a total of $250 billion approximately. With enterprises moving away from data center build-outs and building their infrastructure needs on public cloud, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) becomes the strongest and fastest growing segment. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) also continues to grow as software vendors are shifting their business model from on-premises licensed software to public cloud based offerings.
The growth seen in cloud system IaaS is 38.6% in 2017 to reach $35 billion. It is likely to continue in near future and is expected at a CAGR of 29.7% by 2021. It will soon surpass SaaS to become second largest segment in cloud industry after cloud advertising. The SaaS is expected to grow by 20.1% to reach $46.3 billion by the end of 2017. It is forecast to grow with a CAGR of 18.4% by 2021. Not very behind, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is expected to grow by 23.5% to reach $8.85 billion by the end of 2017. It is forecast to grow with a CAGR of 19.9% by 2021 to a total market size of $14.80 billion.
It makes a lot of sense when we see infrastructure services growing at a faster rate than the cloud application services. IaaS cloud is the most basic tier of cloud based computing, in which customers can expect to find software and hardware that power the rest of the cloud infrastructure- the processor computing power, network resources, storage, and so on. Provisioning of IaaS cloud resources can be done easily and quickly, but the standalone infrastructure is not only useful. A various set of tools and services for coding and deploying applications (PaaS) are layered on the top of IaaS, and then the licensed software and applications make up the SaaS.
While exploring their options within the cloud, it becomes necessary for enterprises to first develop the infrastructure that is, by going through the consultancy, design, and implementation process of an IaaS cloud – and then begin to develop their PaaS and SaaS options for application deployment and ongoing management. We see many existing examples in the market such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure offering services that range from the infrastructure, through middleware services, and into deployment and ongoing operations services.
Regardless of the phenomenal progress of these cloud service providers, there have been concerns in the past few years that hold back the adoption of IaaS. Enterprises still have security concerns for their services. However, companies have regulatory compliance and data residency requirements that prevent sensitive data from uploading on the cloud. Lack of knowledge about cloud services and simple misconfiguration of the IaaS environments may lead to a big threat. Despite security concerns, the overall confidence is high. IT leaders and organizations are in favor of cloud adoption due to the sizable investments cloud providers make to their own security. Thus, cloud computing is ready to lay the essential foundation for the greatly expanded IT industry and give out economic advantages.
