IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service

As a not for profit, corporation or government entity, you have many stringent requirements for the systems that power your organisations. You need solutions that can stand up to the changing environments that you operate in while staying within a reasonable budget. However, trying to deploy and maintain the necessary hardware on-premises to keep up with your efforts is a difficult task. The market can move too fast and opportunities get lost before a monolithic infrastructure can adapt to the change.

Infrastructure as a Service is a cloud hosting technology that decentralises your organisation’s infrastructure. You no longer need to have expansive data centres and equipment rooms filled with servers to meet your operational needs. Instead, staff members log in to a cloud hosting platform to access the necessary resources. Switching to this type of infrastructure brings many benefits to your organisation, from the speed of deployment to decreased costs.

Speed Up Provisioning

One of the most time-consuming parts of a traditional infrastructure is the lag time between a resource request and actually getting the hardware ready. You have to go through the procurement and deployment process, along with setting up the equipment. This process could take weeks, months or even years, depending on the complexity and the red tape required. In contrast, Infrastructure as a Service can instantly provide access to server space and compute power. Development teams can continue their projects without hitting massive unproductive periods and stick to their schedules.

New teams and departments don’t have to wait for the provisioning team to catch up either. In some cases, they can request the resources they need without needing to involve anyone else. This frees up the IT department’s plate for other essential duties.

There are also many other options to consider such as PaaS – Platform as a Service, DRaaS – Disaster Recovery as a Service. Also IaaS vs DRaaS vs PaaS.

Cut Down Your Operating Costs

The upfront and ongoing costs associated with on-premises infrastructure can eat up a technology budget without leaving room for new equipment. Everything from putting together an area of the building for the servers to keeping them patched takes up a lot of resources. IaaS eliminates the upfront portion of these costs since the IaaS provider is the one who handles that side of things. Their entire business model revolves around offering this hardware and related services, so they have an end-to-end service in place. There’s also CapEx vs OpEx in an IT environment to consider.

Adapting to the modern marketplace is tough, especially when disruptive startups can completely change things overnight. You never quite know what you’re going to wake up to in the morning, and traditional infrastructure takes far too long to shift. Cloud-based infrastructure puts you in the best position to take advantage of these opportunities and supports your teams with the server resources they need to make it happen.

Scale Up and Down On-Demand

You don’t run at your peak capacity at all times. On-premises infrastructure requires you to purchase and maintain enough hardware for your peaks but ignores the reality that you’ll rarely have that high of a demand. That equipment sits around taking up space and money. Infrastructure as a Service allows you to scale your services up and down whenever you need it. If you require additional development resources for a new project, you can quickly get those set up. Once they finish the launch phase, they may not need the same capacity.

Reduce Maintenance Tasks

Staying on top of routine maintenance is important in complex infrastructures, but it often ends up on the back burner compared to the many other tasks that the IT department handles on a daily basis. IaaS shifts a lot of these duties to the cloud provider, making it possible for your in-house staff to focus on strategy over the daily operations of the infrastructure.

Boost Security Measures

You may face significant IT security requirements in your industry or when you’re handling sensitive information, but the organisation may not be able to afford the best of the best equipment. Cybercrime is an ever-growing threat, and hackers are always looking for targets with plenty of vulnerabilities and attack surfaces to exploit. You may not be able to increase your IT security budget, but you can leverage the resources that an IaaS provider has. They operate with innovative security measures that give you more comprehensive coverage than you could manage in-house. After all, the IaaS company has to provide safe and secure servers for its customers, so they’re going to focus a lot of their budget on it.

Improve Uptime

If a critical server goes down in an on-premises environment, your organisation may lose access to critical resources. Backups could be available, but these take time to restore and access. A cloud environment is distributed, so hardware failure won’t result in downtime. This configuration also makes it easy to deploy updates, as everything can remain online while each piece of equipment receives updates in turn.