Infrastructure as a Service

Lift-and-shift migration: This is the fastest and least expensive method of migrating an application or workload to the cloud. Without refactoring your underlying architecture, you can increase the scale and performance, enhance the security and reduce the costs of running an application or workload.

Test and development: Your team can quickly set up and dismantle test and development environments, bringing new applications to market faster. IaaS makes it quick and economical to scale dev/test environments up and down.

Storage, backup and recovery: Your organisation avoids the capital outlay for storage and the complexity of storage management, which typically requires a skilled staff to manage data and meet legal and compliance requirements. IaaS is useful for handling unpredictable demand and steadily growing storage needs. It also can simplify planning and management of backup and recovery systems.

Web apps: IaaS provides all the infrastructure to support web apps, including storage, web and application servers, and networking resources. Your organisation can quickly deploy web apps on IaaS and easily scale infrastructure up and down when demand for the apps is unpredictable.

High-performance computing: High-performance computing on supercomputers, computer grids or computer clusters helps solve complex problems involving millions of variables or calculations. Examples include protein folding and earthquake simulations, climate and weather predictions, financial modelling and product design evaluations.

What are the primary advantages of IAAS?

Reduces capital expenditures and optimises costs:  IaaS eliminates the cost of configuring and managing a physical data centre, which makes it a cost-effective choice for migrating to the cloud. The pay-as-you-go subscription models used by IaaS providers help you reduce hardware costs and maintenance and enable your IT team to focus on core business.

Increases scale and performance of IT workloads:  IaaS lets you scale globally and accommodate spikes in resource demand. That way, you can deliver IT resources to employees from anywhere in the world faster and enhance application performance.

Increases stability, reliability and supportability: With IaaS, there’s no need to maintain and upgrade software and hardware or troubleshoot equipment problems. With the appropriate agreement in place, the service provider assures that your infrastructure is reliable and meets service-level agreements (SLAs).

Improves business continuity and disaster recovery: Achieving high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery is expensive because it requires a significant amount of technology and staff. But with the right SLA in place, IaaS helps to reduce this cost. It also helps you access applications and data as usual during a disaster or outage.

Enhances security: With the appropriate service agreement, a cloud service provider can offer better security for your applications and data than the security you would attain in house.

Helps you innovate and get new apps to users faster:  With IaaS, once you’ve decided to launch a new product or initiative, the necessary computing infrastructure can be ready in minutes or hours, rather than in days or weeks.  And because you don’t need to set up the underlying infrastructure, IaaS lets you deliver your apps to users faster.

Reduces capital expenditures and optimises costs:  IaaS eliminates the cost of configuring and managing a physical data centre, which makes it a cost-effective choice for migrating to the cloud. The pay-as-you-go subscription models used by IaaS providers help you reduce hardware costs and maintenance and enable your IT team to focus on core business.

Increases scale and performance of IT workloads:  IaaS lets you scale globally and accommodate spikes in resource demand. That way, you can deliver IT resources to employees from anywhere in the world faster and enhance application performance.

Increases stability, reliability and supportability: With IaaS, there’s no need to maintain and upgrade software and hardware or troubleshoot equipment problems. With the appropriate agreement in place, the service provider assures that your infrastructure is reliable and meets service-level agreements (SLAs).

Improves business continuity and disaster recovery: Achieving high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery is expensive because it requires a significant amount of technology and staff. But with the right SLA in place, IaaS helps to reduce this cost. It also helps you access applications and data as usual during a disaster or outage.

Enhances security: With the appropriate service agreement, a cloud service provider can offer better security for your applications and data than the security you would attain in house.

Helps you innovate and get new apps to users faster:  With IaaS, once you’ve decided to launch a new product or initiative, the necessary computing infrastructure can be ready in minutes or hours, rather than in days or weeks.  And because you don’t need to set up the underlying infrastructure, IaaS lets you deliver your apps to users faster.

IaaS works by mobilising a third-party cloud service provider. This cloud provider hosts the IT infrastructure. That means servers, cloud storage, hardware and virtualisation. IaaS delivery is automated. System maintenance and data storage is often handed over to the IaaS provider.

In other words, the service provider hosts the infrastructure on their client’s behalf across different datacenters making up the cloud. The client accesses the infrastructure online and uses it for the same purposes that an in-house IT infrastructure would traditionally serve. It can be accessed through computers, mobile devices, or virtual machines.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage and analyse data.

A hybrid cloud is a type of cloud computing that combines on-premises infrastructure – or a private cloud – with a public cloud. Hybrid clouds allow data and apps to move between the two environments.

These three types of cloud computing can be easily confused. All three service models run on the cloud. However, they each have the distinct features that differentiate them from one another.

IaaS is a cloud-based solution for virtual IT resources. PaaS, in contrast, provides platforms from which clients can develop and deploy their business applications. Different still, SaaS is a software distribution model hosting applications for clients to make use of over the internet.