IT as a Service Becoming Commonplace: Survey

Nearly 75 percent of respondents believe that the shift to ITaaS will take place in the next three to five years.

A survey by F5 Networks found that at least 67 percent of enterprises have implemented or are in the process of implementing infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, and that 15 percent of enterprises have implemented or are in the process of implementing chargeback capabilities, setting the stage for full-scale ITaaS across enterprises. In addition, nearly 75 percent of respondents believe that the shift to IT as a service (ITaaS) will take place in the next three to five years.

The survey, which included 538 responses from enterprise IT professionals, summarizes enterprises’ attitudes about and progress toward implementing ITaaS—a business model in which stakeholders select and self-provision IT services on demand. Survey results indicated that with the static data center model of the past lacking sufficient agility to support today’s myriad user types, complex applications and increasing demands on IT, enterprises are showing support for the idea of ITaaS as they move toward a dynamic data center model.

"ITaaS is a promising option for many enterprises, given the range of demands placed on data centers, which traditionally aren’t flexible enough to adapt to the requirements of today’s applications," said Karl Triebes, CTO and senior vice president of product development at F5 Networks. "Users are increasingly demanding support for a variety of applications with multidimensional needs. This requires additional functionality and automation capabilities that are typically inherent in dynamic data centers and associated with ITaaS."

The survey found three out of four IT managers (75 percent) say their organization’s philosophy and needs align with an ITaaS framework. Eighty-five percent of IT organizations surveyed have virtualized or are in the process of virtualizing their servers. Thirteen percent are close to being able to perform long distance live migrations of their environment, and 19 percent are close to a full self-service provisioning model, while 80 percent of IT managers believe that ITaaS will become mainstream.

"Traditionally, the data center is a siloed environment, but IT must now reinvent the way data center elements are assembled to deliver applications," said Schalk Theron, chief information officer at cloud content management specialist SpringCM. "Users now typically want to obtain a service without having to call and ask someone for it. ITaaS is doing just that—providing a catalogue of services to users and allowing them to self-provision applications. The time has come for IT to think in business terms and move at the speed of business. This is done by automating and aligning technology to match business demand."