Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) describes the various ways in which third-party vendors provide cloud-driven, cloud-hosted infrastructure to businesses. This infrastructure comes in a variety of forms, including (but not limited to) public clouds, virtual machines (VMs), bare metal servers, and high-performance computing (HPC). Because of the incredible diversity of IaaS tools, any organization or user within a business could find benefit from the business employing IaaS.
Companies use IaaS for a wide variety of reasons, most commonly including convenience, ease of accessibility, flexible scaling, and reduced operational expenditure (OpEx) costs. The latter two benefits are facilitated by the pay-as-you-go nature of cloud services; with IaaS, businesses only pay for what use, eliminating the large upfront costs typically associated with purchasing infrastructure. Companies also don’t have to worry about infrastructure management, as with IaaS that responsibility falls to the cloud service provider (CSP). IaaS is ultimately used to build or expand business capabilities and can be especially beneficial during times of extreme growth.
Once a business has determined which IaaS tools they’d like to utilize, integration capabilities are the next big considerations, followed by how that infrastructure will be secured. IaaS presents no benefit to a company if it doesn’t integrate with its existing systems, and once it does integrate, the company needs to properly secure any data and transactions that might go through that infrastructure. IaaS security falls to the service user, not the CSP; however, many CSPs will offer compatible security solutions for that infrastructure or build basic security features into the service.
IaaS is the cloud computing representative of the “aaS" trio: IaaS, developer-focused platform as a service (PaaS), and generalist software as a service (SaaS).
To qualify for inclusion in the Infrastructure as a Service category, a product must:
- Provide third-party-hosted infrastructure
- Allow businesses to run computing, virtualization, storage, and/or other core infrastructure needs
- Function on a pay-as-you-go or utilization-based purchase model
- Provide live usage and performance tracking and reporting
