Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is considered the bottom of the cloud stack. IaaS provides basic, relatively raw infrastructure upon which to pour your workloads and environments. It is like an unconfigured data center, just one probably hundreds of miles away from your company. Then there is Platform as a Service (PaaS), which adds keys parts of the application stack, making it easier to develop and run applications. The simple layer is the highest layer – Software as a Service (SaaS). This is pretty much as it sounds: fully functional apps that run in the cloud rather than one of your hard drives.
So what makes IaaS attractive? Like me, Bluelock wanted to know, and they surveyed 325 IT pros to find out.
What drives IaaS adoption? Saving money and increasing efficiency, as well as boosting performance and reliability. This is interesting, as many doubt the cloud’s ability to process data as well as local infrastructure.
What do users not seem to care about? Getting rid of infrastructure chores to focus more on strategic items. Heck, I thought that was the whole point of the cloud!
Next up was what value IaaS providers provide. Here services delivery adaptability and top service and support led the way. Not so important? While many service providers tout themselves as trusted advisors, this is not what these respondents are looking for.
In term of current IaaS use, testing pre-production workloads, supporting new workloads, and even running business critical apps were most popular. Future use will focus on these, but will add disaster recovery as well.
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The Magic of Bluelock
Bluelock is no cloud slouch. Last year it was named as a challenger in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (though it failed to make the cut in this year’s report).
As usual, Gartner looks at the pluses and minuses. On the positive side, “Bluelock has a track record of successfully serving production use cases, including complex and mission-critical needs. It is one of VMware's closest service provider partners, and is usually one of the first service providers to implement new VMware products and version upgrades,” Gartner said. “Bluelock has strong multicloud capabilities. In addition to supporting vCloud Connector, it also supports vCloud Global Connect, which allows federation between participating vCloud Datacenter Service providers.”
But what would a Magic Quadrant be without a knock or two? “Bluelock is trying to compete with much larger vendors, but its more limited engineering resources mean that it has little margin for error in execution if it wants to keep up its pace of innovation,” Gartner argued. “Bluelock has concentrated on quickly delivering VMware's technologies and services and its road map continues this pattern. It is highly dependent on VMware's release cycles and technological innovation.”
Edited by
Blaise McNamee
