I recently came across a post that probably caught a lot of attention from IT folks. It basically talked about the death of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The ironic thing is that IaaS is one of the most (if not THE most) available cloud services available. So why the little love for such a service? If you ask me, it’s because it’s like being half-pregnant. This is why.

So what are the main reasons for organizations to adopt cloud? Cost is a big one, since yes, if you subscribe to a service you save all the nasty upfront purchase fees, leverage OPEX over CAPEX and don’t have to worry about care and feeding costs (power, cooling, etc). The other reason is that organizations just want to outsource their storage and computing power to eliminate the hassles of managing it in-house.

So if you follow the logic, why are these organizations looking at IaaS? They still would need to be responsible for security, care and feeding of the O/S and programs. You’ve actually complicated things a little bit as the servers are off-site. Why wouldn’t you then just upgrade to Platform as a Service (PaaS), have the cloud provider handle all the security and compliance (written into the SLA ofcourse) and just worry about the actual programs running on the cloud boxes? Doesn’t it make more sense to delegate more of the responsibility to maintain the computing environment to the provider and make it easier on your IT team to take care of all the other IT tasks that are more business-focused such as upgrading billing systems or customer centric services?

Don’t get me wrong. There are some great cases for IaaS, but I just don’t understand why this type of service has become the dominant one when PaaS and SaaS makes more sense to me. Any ideas?