IaaS Trends and Strategies

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Meet the Experts

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Ashish Nadkarni

Group Vice President and General Manager, Worldwide Infrastructure Research

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Dave McCarthy

Research Vice President, Cloud and Edge Services, Worldwide Infrastructure Research

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Jasdeep Singh

Research Manager, Cloud and Edge Services, Worldwide Infrastructure Research

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Penny Madsen

Senior Research Director, Cloud and Edge Services, Worldwide Infrastructure Research



IDC's IaaS Trends and Strategies is a program focused exclusively on the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market, technology trends, buying patterns, adoption, and use cases.


Markets and Subjects Analyzed


IaaS Storage Services

Standardized, highly scalable storage, delivered as an on-demand, pay-per-use service for ephemeral and/or persistent data storage needs; segmented by data organization – file, object, and block storage services and available for performance or capacity-optimized use cases; may also be classified as a cold tier (cloud cold storage services), based on the price and availability characteristics of the service

IaaS Compute Services

Standardized, highly scalable compute resources, delivered as an on-demand, pay-per-use services; including virtual machines, containers, or bare metal instances and segmented by the compute environment offered by the service – virtualized x86, bare metal, accelerated, and "other compute services" (capturing non-x86 as well as newer cloud-native environments)

Adjacent Cloud Services

Elements of infrastructure, platform, and systems infrastructure as a service that provide a complete experience for their growing and diverse base of users; referred to as adjacent cloud services, these tools and solutions are designed to accommodate a growing rage of infrastructure needs (e.g., advanced analytics, containers, serverless)

Cloud Workloads and Migration

Enterprise workloads (including performance-intensive computing workloads) that are hosted on public cloud IaaS; covers the hosting of these workloads in the cloud and includes traditional or legacy workloads moved and modernized via a "lift and shift" mechanisms, as well as "cloud native" workloads that are developed for cloud deployments; research including movement of existing enterprise workloads into public cloud; while the total universe of cloud migration includes migration of applications into infrastructure, platform, and software as a service, this program focus on migrations to IaaS


Core Research


  • Worldwide Public Cloud IaaS Market Shares
  • Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Forecast
  • Adoption of IaaS Services in the Enterprise IT Environment (IaaSView Survey)
  • Functional Ecosystems That Are Emerging Around Public Cloud Infrastructure Services
  • Assessment of Various IaaS Storage Services Offerings Including Use Case for File, Block, and Object Storage
  • Assessment of Various IaaS Compute Services Offerings Including Use Case for Accelerated and Nonaccelerated Compute Instances
  • Growth of Cloud Cold Storage Services and the Broader Cloud Cold Storage Ecosystem
  • Cloud and Workload Migration Opportunities and Use Cases
  • Impact of Multicloud and Hybrid Cloud Trends on Public Cloud IaaS Services
  • Public Cloud Service Provider Ecosystems, Partnerships, and Alliances
  • Expansion of Public Cloud IaaS Services to On Premises, Hosted/Collocated Facilities, and Edge Locations
  • Segmentation of IaaS and PaaS Revenue by Workloads

In addition to the insight provided in this service, IDC may conduct research on specific topics or emerging market segments via research offerings that require additional IDC funding and client investment.


Key Questions Answered


  1. What enterprise workloads are moving to/from cloud?
  2. What are recent buyer trends in the IaaS market?
  3. What is the difference between hybrid and multicloud deployments? How are enterprises leveraging these environments?
  4. What are the economic and operational advantages and considerations with the use of IaaS?
  5. What capabilities will be added to current IaaS services over the next 24 months?
  6. How/why are customers increasing their usage of IaaS?
  7. What are the top challenges when migrating workloads to public cloud?
  8. What are the key best practices for movement to and from public cloud IaaS services?