How SMBs Will Shape The IaaS Market In 2020

In 2020, the global cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is set to reach $50 billion and in India it is expected to touch at least $2.3 billion by 2022. Improved infrastructure, economic benefits and increasing innovation aided by a thriving startup ecosystem are key factors driving this growth. These trends are not unique to India. IaaS, the second-largest segment in the global cloud service market, has been predicted to see the highest growth rate across market segments, owing to rising demands that cannot be met by traditional data centres

- Prabhakar Jayakumar

In 2020, the IaaS market will primarily be shaped by two drivers: increasing competition among IaaS providers and growing numbers of small and medium businesses (SMBs). The competitive IaaS market implies that players are going to go the extra mile to achieve new milestones in speed, security, costs and convenience. At the same time, a rapidly expanding entrepreneurial ecosystem will define how IaaS providers customize their offerings.

Provider competition will drive differentiation

Choosing the right IaaS provider is not an easy task in today’s highly competitive market. To differentiate themselves, IaaS providers will push boundaries to capture a larger share of the market.

• Achieving new speeds in on-demand scaling

A web hosting services company, Reclaim Hosting, faced challenges with flexibility and scale due to their reliance on dedicated servers. They were unable to scale operations beyond the United States as dedicated servers did not allow for compliance with data security and privacy regulations. That is when they migrated 80 per cent of their infrastructure to DigitalOcean cloud which gave them the ability to expand their product offerings on-demand, minimize response time, and ensure an uptime of 99.75 per cent. Small businesses and startups may not require much IT infrastructure in the early stages of business, but this changes as organisations rapidly expand. Growth is sometimes unexpected or seasonal, but infrastructure must be a step ahead of demand. Agile and flexible scaling and load balancing is vital to small enterprises and startups since it allows these organizations to focus on managing customers, and not worry about infrastructure. Today, a handful of IaaS providers offer super-fast scaling of hundreds of virtual machines in seconds, and on-demand scaling will continue to be a competitive differentiator in 2020.