How businesses stand to benefit from IaaS

INFRASTRUCTURE as a Service of (IaaS) refers to a subset of cloud services which provide businesses with computer infrastructure on an outsourced basis to support enterprise functions on a pay-as-you-go model.

Typically, businesses turn to IaaS for servers, data storage, hardware management, and bandwidth in efforts to increase their business agility, achieve more predictable budgeting, and enhance the overall service level.

And in the last decade or so, thanks in part to the “cloud-first” trend boosted by digital transformation initiatives, organization have come to embrace and have adopted Soft-as-a-Service (SaaS). However, they seem to be a bit more hesitant when it comes to IaaS.

In reality, though, businesses of all sizes could immensely benefit from IaaS. For starters, in this model, cloud service providers own the infrastructure, and responsible for running, managing, upgrading, and maintaining the infrastructure.

Enhanced cost efficiency

And since the services providers are ones that are doing much of the infrastructure management as the owner of the resources; businesses no longer have to worry about ensuring uptime, servicing hardware and networking equipment or upgrading them. Companies will be only provisioning workloads on an as-needed basis and reduce CAPEX spend while moving to an OPEX model.

The pay-as-you-go model also has the potential to reduce the fixed costs for businesses as IaaS use is metered, and companies could avoid paying large sums in monthly or annual lease payments.

Beyond that, it saves businesses from having to invest or purchase additional workforce and capacity to take on a sudden and seasonal increase in workload. This unprecedented level of flexibility also allows enterprises to scale their resources up or down at will at any given time.

As the technology continues to mature, offerings from cloud providers get more robust, with the latest and most powerful servers, storage systems and networking capabilities designed to meet the varying need of modern businesses. Companies meanwhile would be in a better position to deal with uncertain businesses environment, with these functions.

Other than is dynamic and flexible functions, IaaS also provide businesses with complete control of their virtual machines (VM) and empower them to build their own VMs, without all the overhead and maintenance cost required in a traditional IT setup.

Without the cost restrictions, companies could customize the virtual infrastructure to their business needs and design the framework that fit them best.

Seamless business continuity and disaster recovery

Modern businesses typically have some form of disaster recovery plans in place either voluntarily or mandated by local regulations. Most often than not, the cost of these plans are usually pretty high, and matters are especially more complicated for businesses with several disparate locations.

With IaaS, however, companies get to consolidate their disaster recovery infrastructure, manage it better, all the while reducing the costs. When a disaster strike, businesses leaders would be able to access the same infrastructure from anywhere at any time, just with an internet connection.

Everything, including web servers, critical business applications, and web servers would be up and running in no time, with minimal recovery time and no loss of data.

In short, businesses spent too much time and money in making infrastructure decisions and acquiring the workforce to manage and maintain the infrastructure. In adopting the IaaS model, companies could instead focus their valuable resources in where it actually matters, to better serve their customers.

---

---

---