Organisations are turning to Infrastructure as a Service to optimise their use of resources and maximise business outcomes. According to a survey conducted by RightScale in February this year, 94 per cent of organisations surveyed were experimenting with IaaS.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model, which provides organisations with the basic computing resources required to support operations, over the Internet. Service providers grant organisations access to infrastructure like servers, storage or networking components on a pay-per-use basis.
Thus, instead of needing a great deal of capital to purchase expensive infrastructure components outright, organisations pays a monthly fee to utilise off-site resources. Similarly to electricity billing, the service provider is responsible for maintaining and caring for the hardware and virtualised services, while the organisation pays for consumption.
The Cloud Computing Stack (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS)
Many organisations considering the implementation of cloud services, struggle to comprehend where IaaS sits in the cloud computing stack. SaaS sits at the top, PaaS in the middle, and IaaS at the base.
SaaS: Software as a Service is a way of delivering applications over the web. Rather than purchasing and installing software themselves, organisations subscribe to the software and store data in the cloud. Organisations use it for a range of purposes, including invoicing, customer information databases and more. Vendors include Xero.com and Salesforce.com.
PaaS: Platform as a Service is a computing platform, which enables developers to build and deploy web applications on hosted infrastructure. Thus, organisations are able to efficiently create applications without purchasing or maintaining the software and infrastructure beneath it. Examples include Windows Azure and Google App Engine.
IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service is the virtualised hardware and software used to deploy and run your applications, including servers, networks, operating systems and more. It provides access to hardware pulled from multiple servers and networks, located in offsite data centres, maintained by your service provider.
Benefits of IaaS
IaaS can give organisations an edge over their competition because it reduces capital expenditure on infrastructure, and increases business agility.
IT infrastructure can be expensive and high-maintenance
IaaS allows companies to outsource the equipment, and the task of maintaining it as well. Instead of purchasing computing resources and hiring IT personnel to manage the site, organisations pay for what they consume during a given period.
This is particularly beneficial for organisations with limited capital, requiring enterprise-level systems to operate successfully. The bonus of reduced capital expenditure is the freeing of funds to allocate to more productive activities, like marketing campaigns or increasing headcount.
Increased flexibility
IaaS provides organisations with the flexibility to instantly scale resources up or down in response to fluctuating requirements. Since additional virtual machines can be created or removed on demand, businesses can handle periods of immense traffic. For example, organisations could leverage IaaS to increase computing capacity for a short period of time during a marketing campaign, scaling resources back down afterwards.
The fundamental advantage of IaaS is that instead of focussing on IT, organisations can centre their efforts on innovation, business strategy, and rolling out new solutions.
The future of IaaS
IaaS is a relatively new concept, with rising adoption rates in the cloud computing world. Gartner analysts predict IaaS uptake will grow 43% by 2016. This has been attributed to the shift from improving IT efficiency, to increasing innovation, and the increased spending of enterprises at the IaaS level. The mounting popularity of IaaS indicates organisations not leveraging these potential benefits may fall behind the competition.
Do you need help evaluating an IaaS solution? We can help you make the move to IaaS. Call us on 1300 562 886 or contact us via this page.