Cloud computing services have become the standard approach for many businesses. However, one of the primary difficulties of cloud computing is understanding all the acronyms used by businesses, tech experts, and marketing materials.
IaaS is one of those acronyms that represents an important cloud computing service. In fact, IaaS is one of the most popular cloud services offered by cloud providers. As a result, it is important to understand what IaaS is and how it compares to the other popular cloud service models.
This post will explain everything your organization needs to know about the cloud computing service IaaS.
What Is IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)?
IaaS is an acronym that stands for Infrastructure as a Service. Infrastructure as a Service is a type of cloud computing that delivers virtualized computing and networking resources over the Internet.
Many tech experts and IaaS providers agree that IaaS is one of the three pillar categories of cloud computing services alongside SaaS (Software as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service).
When utilizing the IaaS cloud computing model, the IaaS provider manages elements of the underlying infrastructure, such as storage, servers, and other networking resources. IaaS providers deliver infrastructure resources to their subscribers through virtual machines accessed via the Internet.
IaaS is a cloud infrastructure that reduces the technical burden for organizations and transfers the responsibility of hosting the computing resources typically found in an on-premises data center to the cloud service provider.
The Business Benefits of IaaS
There are several important business benefits of utilizing cloud infrastructure. There is a reason why IaaS is one of the most popular cloud service offerings. Ultimately, the quality of services is dependent on the cloud provider. Still, if you choose a reputable partner like AWS, IBM Cloud, Google, etc., your business can enjoy the following benefits:
- Cost efficient
- Scalability
- Resilience
- Performance
- Speed
Cost Efficient
Perhaps the most significant benefit of IaaS from a business perspective is its cost efficiency. The cost of implementing and maintaining a physical infrastructure for data storage and computing is significant.
Not only do you have to purchase expensive hardware and software, but you must also hire IT professionals who can maintain the hardware and keep systems and operating systems updated and secure.
There is a reason many businesses do not build their own data centers. It is cost-prohibitive. IaaS removes all of the costs associated with a physical computing infrastructure. Instead, IaaS providers are responsible for purchasing and maintaining expensive hardware.
Furthermore, IaaS and other cloud services are charged following a pay-as-you-go model. What does this mean? It means your organization only pays for the computing resources it uses. Cloud providers offer easy-to-manage subscriptions that enable organizations to control their costs and plan their financial future more accurately.
Scalability
IaaS, like other cloud computing service models, is nearly infinitely scalable. This is a major benefit to businesses. When user demand increases, resources can be scaled to meet demand quickly.
Furthermore, if demand shrinks, resources can be scaled down to accurately accommodate present demand. This unmatched flexibility allows organizations to make quick decisions without worrying about server crashes and provisioning additional hardware resources.
Cloud computing is popular because of its ability to scale on demand. If your business wants to operate flexibly and scale resources to meet demand in real time, IaaS and cloud computing are the best options.
Resilience
Another major benefit of IaaS is its resiliency. IaaS providers have data centers and servers spread across the globe. If an issue or natural disaster affects one set of servers, these providers have many more, ensuring that your application and infrastructure are resilient.
Traditional approaches to IT infrastructure rely on an underlying infrastructure typically located on-premises. The issue with this approach is that if anything happens to this location, your infrastructure goes down.
An outage can significantly impact your business and lead to lost opportunities, damaged brand reputation, and more. In a world where users expect your products to be available around the clock, IaaS provides a level of resiliency that cannot be matched.
Performance
IaaS helps businesses deliver better application performance to their users. The closer services and apps are physically to your users, the less latency that occurs, which leads to better performance.
Most of the major cloud providers have a large geographic footprint. This means that your apps and services can get closer to end users and deliver better performance. Performance levels greatly affect the customer experience.
A poor customer experience will drive users away and frustrate them with your application or service. On the other hand, good or superb performance levels will delight customers and deliver a quality customer experience that will keep them coming back.
Speed
IaaS is beneficial for organizations because it can be deployed quickly. Do you have a new idea you want to test out? Perhaps you need to scale your resources to meet current demand. With IaaS, provisioning resources is fast.
Following a traditional infrastructure approach would require your business to purchase and install new servers or purchase a lot of computing equipment and resources upfront when demand calls for it.
IaaS enables your business to access the computing and network resources it wants on demand. You don’t have to wait for installation or purchase of equipment. When you want additional resources, you simply add more.
Final Thoughts
IaaS is one of the most popular cloud computing models. Many businesses are seeing that this approach is far more convenient and effective than the traditional on-premises approach due in large part to the immense benefits provided by IaaS.
There are several different IaaS providers for your business to choose from. If you need help determining which cloud provider is the best fit for your business or which cloud services your business should choose, contact a cloud development partner like Koombea for technical guidance and industry expertise.
