Posted by Paul Anderson
Know About IaaS Services
If you are not living in caves for the last ten years then you probably aren’t new to the idea of cloud. Cloud computing that once was believed to be only a fun project of some high school geeks and futuristic dream of some mad dreamers has matured to become the next big solution for all corporate IT problems. It has attained commercial maturity and increasingly becoming the first choice for enterprises to solve their IT requirements. However, with time cloud computing has also become more and more complex in nature. If you now talk to a vendor you’re likely to hear more than a dozen cloud computing possibilities to solve your single IT problem and honestly, this can be confusing. Therefore, to make your job easy here is an introduction to IaaS or infrastructure as a service solution.
IaaS is a popular form of cloud storage services offered to enterprises. As the name suggests, IT infrastructure, such as virtualization, is offered through Internet as a service. Software and storage spaces are hired on a third-party virtualized environment and normally is charged based on usage. The advantage of this model is that you are no longer required to build datacenter, buy software or maintain servers for your need. All these can be outsources completely to cloud computing service providers. Because of the nature of the services offered Infrastructure-as-a-Service is also called Hardware-as-a-Service.
Cloud computing has been categorized into three main tires, namely – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS is said to create the basic layer upon which the rest of the two layers are constituted.
Features of IaaS: If you want to host your applications, maintain server and data storage space without investing in the hardware required then you may have to consider IaaS service. In contrast to software as a service, the most known form of cloud computing model where the end user accesses software through web browser with the service provider maintaining servers, VMs, network equipment etc., you actually buy server space in cloud, build your servers, and manage applications on the hosted environment in IaaS. The control of the server and that of hosted applications rests with you. You can adjust storage capacity according to your needs. The cloud computing services companies offer the storage space and hardware support required by you to maintain your software environment.
The immediate benefits of IaaS services are:
- No requirements of maintaining hardware and networking infrastructure
- No need to build servers and storage spaces
- Less dependency on in-house IT team for maintaining hardware and network
- Less work of IT administration
- Opportunity to host software and enterprise applications on a scalable, flexible climate
- Better accessibility to software and applications
- Cost advantages of reduced expenses on hardware and infrastructure
- Manageable monthly subscription changes based of resource consumption
