Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is something that more SMBs are investing in, but what do customers want in an IaaS solution and how can resellers ensure that customers get the best solution for their needs?
As IT systems become increasingly complex and costly for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), many are turning to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to manage their IT requirements, rather than keeping it in-house.
For businesses operating on tight margins, it can help to unlock efficiencies and help to save costs. “SMEs are turning to IaaS solutions to transform their estate, offload elements of IT management, enable remote working and reduce capital expenditure,” says Paul Collins, CTO at UBDS Digital.
“While the scale differs, their expectations typically don’t often mirror those of larger organisations. They are looking for flexibility, reduced capital costs, and the ability to innovate without needing large in-house IT capabilities.
“The challenge is not appetite, but confidence and capability. SMBs need trusted guidance to make the right decisions, especially when considering the consumption-based economics of IaaS as well as needing to bring in capability to execute a successful cloud migration. Overall adoption is on the rise, narrowing the gap with large enterprises.”
Richard Eglon, CMO, Nebula Global Services. says SMBs have been an early adopter of IaaS technology due to its scalability and flexibility – as well as its ability to enable SMBs to compete on a level playing field with larger enterprises. “The ‘Pay-as-You-Go’ pricing models associated with IaaS remove the cost of entry barrier associated with traditional IT systems such as hardware CapEx and associated installation and maintenance costs,” he says. “IaaS also provides enterprise-grade security and compliance such as DDoS protection, ISO 27001, encryption and GDPR.”
IaaS also offers SMBs greater control and flexibility, adds Norbert Biro, senior security researcher at Acronis Threat Research Unit. “This lets businesses install, configure and manage their software on the provided infrastructure,” he says. “Popular IaaS services include Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine.”
Johnny Carpenter, VP Channel and Alliances EMEA at 11:11 Systems, says that cost is one of the main drivers of IaaS activity. “Companies are looking for solutions that will reduce costs, limit downtime and deliver maximum value to the organisation,” he says. “IaaS provides an attractive alternative to investing in the necessary hardware and the associated costs of managing and maintaining these solutions in-house.
“Other factors driving the adoption of IaaS are that data centre contracts are coming up for renewal and companies are looking for more cost-effective solutions. This is also true for those organisations that are due to update their infrastructure, networking and storage hardware that are coming to end-of-life and due to be upgraded. Investing in and maintaining these can be costly and doesn’t provide the flexibility or scalability to upgrade or downgrade according to the organisation’s specific needs. They also carry additional costs such as maintenance fees, repair costs and the need to employ skilled staff to manage the systems.”
Johnny says that another key benefit of IaaS for SMBs is the outsourcing of expertise. “Migrating workloads to the cloud, and maintaining the networks and servers needed, requires a high degree of technical knowledge in some very specific areas,” he says. “It can be a challenge for SMBs to hire and retain the staff needed to achieve this in house, however, with IaaS this expertise is outsourced and provided for them.”
Trends
But while adoption of IaaS is on the rise, SMB customer expectations are changing too. Paul says that customers expect IaaS solutions to provide more than virtual machines and storage. “They expect to turn to IaaS to build environments that are integrated, secure and compliant with industry regulations,” he says.
“IaaS features that several years ago may have been viewed as ‘nice-to-haves’ such as operational resilience, system observability and automation are now considered essential. Hybrid and multi-cloud deployments are also rising, alongside adoption of zero trust security models and cloud-native tools. Cost transparency and ongoing visibility remains ever important.”
Norbert adds that businesses are now prioritising IaaS solutions that allow employees to securely access files and systems from anywhere with an internet connection. “Alongside accessibility, security has become a critical focus and the importance of backups has grown,” he says. “Regarding data protection, there is no difference between on-premise physical, virtual or cloud workloads. You must treat them equally based on the system’s importance to the business.”
Customers are also increasingly keen to identify Green Cloud providers that are sustainably conscious on the negative impact data centres are having on the environment, Richard notes. “Over the coming years we are going to see an increasing trend of IaaS consumers move to carbon-neutral data centres with the likes of Google already setting a ‘Carbon-free’ energy goal by 2030,” he says.
“However, this paradigm shift is going to bring its own challenges, with the exponential growth of AI driving huge data processing demands and the compute power required to host this technology revolution.”
Reseller conversations
When talking to customers about IaaS solutions, there are various advantages resellers should be highlighting. “Resellers should focus on business value, not just technology, which means highlighting benefits like pay-as-you-go scalability, outsourced IT management, quicker deployment of services, and improved governance and business continuity,” says Paul.
“Embedding their services like backup, DR, security and cost control helps differentiate an IaaS offering. Address concerns around cost visibility, migration complexity, and security by offering guidance, managed services and simple onboarding pathways.”
Norbert notes that resellers should highlight that while IaaS providers manage the infrastructure, data protection and security broadly fall on the customer. “This means implementing robust endpoint protection to safeguard against malware and cyber threats that could compromise cloud-based workloads,” he says.
“Maintaining comprehensive backup strategies is also important to ensure data recovery in cases of accidental deletion, corruption or ransomware attack. By emphasising these protective measures, resellers can help customers understand that a secure IaaS environment requires proactive security and data integrity management.”
Richard says that resellers should focus on how IaaS enables customers to focus on their core business while still being able to access best in class IT infrastructure. “Also, highlight how it supports a remote/hybrid working environment delivering multi-region business continuity.
“The ‘pay-as-you-go’ commercial model delivers a scalable and flexible framework to expand into new territories and adopt cutting-edge technology platforms such as AI as and when the business need requires.”
Johnny agrees that the cost savings that IaaS can provide, such as how the business can take advantage of the economies of scale involved, should be emphasised. “As everything is being acquired in bulk by the service provider, for example the licences, power and physical datacentre infrastructure,” he says. “Companies also do not need to hire and maintain a team of employees to look after the infrastructure, saving resources and allowing them to focus on their business goals.”
Resellers should emphasise how simple it can be to make the change to IaaS. “A lot of businesses see this as a time consuming and disruptive process; however, this does not have to be the case,” he says. “The process can be very smooth if the right steps are taken prior to the migration, namely conducting a thorough technical evaluation of the customer’s current system and choosing a solution that fits their specific needs.”
Migration challenges
That said, there can be challenges for SMBs when migrating to an IaaS model, but resellers can guide their customers through this, says Mallory Beaudreau, RVP, Account Management at Apptio, an IBM Company. “Companies often face two distinct challenges,” she says. “Firstly, moving away from traditional IT systems to the cloud requires a mindset shift. Cloud is flexible and dynamic, but traditional IT was not as adaptive, and this will involve a mentality shift about how to respond to capacity demands.
“However, the cloud allows you to build an application that adapts to capacity needs, so you can operate at low levels and turn up capacity as demand increases at peak times.”
Future
IaaS adoption will continue to rise over the next 12 to 18 months among SMBs, Paul says. “Growth will be fuelled by the need for AI infrastructure, increasing automation, for example, AIOps, and the normalisation of hybrid work,” he says. “IaaS services will evolve to offer better cost management tools, sovereign cloud options, and simplified access to high-performance computing. Infrastructure will increasingly become invisible; what matters is the business agility and the outcomes it enables.”
Norbert adds that the evolution of IaaS in the next 18 months will focus on serverless computing. “This enables businesses to run applications without managing infrastructure, and hybrid cloud models that combine on-premises and public cloud benefits for flexibility and control,” he says. “Edge computing will also play a significant role, processing data closer to its source to reduce latency and improve efficiency.”