Lionel Sujay Vailshery
Research expert covering the consumer electronics industry
In the ever-evolving realm of cloud computing, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) stands as a fundamental cornerstone, shaping how businesses deploy and manage their digital infrastructure. Alongside software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is one of the core service models of cloud computing. Under the IaaS model, customers (often enterprises rather than individuals) are permitted to provision and access virtualized hardware and resources such as servers, networks, storage, or virtual machines. In other words, the customer does not hold responsibility for maintaining or developing these resources but instead is free to focus on managing higher-level resources, such as the platform, the operating system, or the necessary software. In this way, customers pay only for what they consume.
IaaS market size
IaaS accounted for over a quarter of the overall cloud computing market in 2023. Public cloud IaaS revenues are expected to rise significantly over the coming years, from around 115 billion U.S. dollars in 2022 to more than 180 billion U.S. dollars by 2024. However, the cloud infrastructure market share is expected to decrease in favor of the promising development of the PaaS market. Nonetheless, the largest segment in the overall cloud computing market is and will continue to be SaaS, with more than 247 billion U.S. dollars in annual revenue.
Major IaaS vendors
In the IaaS market, the largest companies by revenue are Amazon (Web Services), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (Compute Engine), as well as the Chinese multinational technology company Alibaba. Despite Amazon being the largest vendor of cloud infrastructure by some margin, its hold over the market may lessen as Google and Microsoft make headway, with surveys suggesting cloud services companies are fighting for a piece of the cloud IaaS market. The annual spending on cloud-based IT infrastructure is projected to grow by over 129 billion U.S. dollars by 2024. Original design manufacturers also play a significant role in the market, making up around one-third of the total market.
