Infrastructure as a Service Benefits 

Cost savings: An obvious benefit of moving to the managed IaaS model is lower infrastructure costs. No longer do organizations have the responsibility of ensuring uptime, maintaining hardware and networking equipment, or replacing old equipment. IaaS  technology also saves enterprises from having to buy more capacity to deal with sudden business spikes. Organizations with a smaller IT infrastructure generally require a smaller IT staff as well. The pay-as-you-go model also provides significant cost savings.

Scalability and flexibility: One of the greatest benefits of IaaS is the ability to scale up and down quickly in response to an enterprise’s requirements. Infrastructure as a Service providers generally have the latest, most powerful storage, servers and networking technology to accommodate the needs of their customers. This on-demand scalability provides added flexibility and greater agility to respond to changing opportunities and requirements.

Faster time to market: Competition is strong in every sector, and time to market is one of the best ways to beat the competition. Because IaaS vendors elasticity and scalability, organizations can ramp up and get the job done (and the product or service to market) more rapidly.

Support for DR, BC and high availability: While every enterprise has some type of disaster recovery plan, the technology behind those plans is often expensive and unwieldy. Organizations with several disparate locations often have different disaster recovery and business continuity plans and technologies, making management virtually impossible.

Focus on business growth: Time, money and energy spent making technology decisions and hiring staff to manage and maintain the technology infrastructure is time not spent on growing the business. By moving infrastructure to a global infrastructure services, organizations can focus their time and resources where they belong, on developing innovations in applications and solutions.

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS: What’s the Difference?

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the next step up from IaaS products, where the provider also supplies the operating environment including the operating system, application services, middleware and other ‘runtimes’ for cloud users. It’s used for development environments where the business can focus on creating an app but wants someone else to maintain the deployment platform. It means you have much simpler workloads but you can’t necessarily be as flexible as you want.

At the highest level of orchestration is Software as a Service. In SaaS infrastructure applications are accessed on demand. Here you just open your browser and go, consuming software rather than installing and running it. A user simply logs on to access the provider’s application. Users can decide how the app will work but pretty much everything else is the responsibility of the software provider.