Business leaders have largely embraced modern IT infrastructure, platform and software innovations throughout the past several years, with legacy systems quickly going the way of the dinosaur. What has become clear is that agile, affordable and elastic computing capabilities are not only in high demand, but simply necessary to competing in the modern, fast-paced markets present in virtually every industry and region. 

Cloud computing has played a major role in this movement, especially when it comes to software, which has been increasingly provisioned through these types of managed contracts. However, infrastructure is now among the hottest segments of the cloud market, as firms work to ensure that their server and data center management is resilient to disruption, supportive of new trends such as the Internet of Things and optimally efficient. 

Major Growth

Gartner recently released a new report regarding the infrastructure-as-a-service market, projecting the industry segment to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 29.1 percent between 2014 and 2019. Predictions made by this firm, International Data Corporation and others regarding the shifting landscape of the cloud from disruptive novel solution to a proverbial utility in use among all organizations and consumers appear to be coming to fruition. 

According to the analysts, this year will be a big one for IaaS, as they forecast the market to grow by 32.8 percent compared to last year and reach a total value of $16.5 billion globally. Considering the fact that organizations need access to scalable and agile solutions, this should not be all that surprising. Gartner also pointed out that the functionality of newer IaaS models is further propelling the market in the right direction. 

"Cloud IaaS can now be used to run most workloads, although not every provider can run every type of workload well," Gartner Vice President Lydia Leong explained. "Cloud IaaS is not a commodity. Providers vary significantly in their features, performance, cost and business terms. Although in theory, cloud IaaS has very little lock-in,  in truth, cloud IaaS is not merely a matter of hardware rental, but an entire data center ecosystem as a service. The more you use its management capabilities, the more value you will receive from the offering, but the more you will be tied to that particular service offering."

Additionally, the analysts suggested companies take bimodal approaches to IaaS, essentially scaling utilization up in a more comfortable fashion rather than completely replacing all existing systems with these tools. 

Other Areas Of Expansion

IaaS can be viewed as one of the more prominent segments of the managed services and hosting market, which has been experiencing exponential growth in the past few years. Between colocation, managed datacenter and cloud computing services, companies are finding ways to craft IT strategies that most closely align with their needs, objectives and capabilities. 

In the coming years, business leaders will likely continue to aggressively embrace these new approaches to IT management in efforts to modernize their operational power.