Top 3 Benefits of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for Your Business
Top 3 Benefits of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for Your Business
July. 2, 2024
Since the turn of the new millennium, the rapid evolution of cloud computing and its associated technologies has enabled businesses to unlock new possibilities and grow disruptively. What initially started as a convenient way to store and share documents has now evolved into a mature ecosystem capable of handling complex computing solutions and hosting your IT infrastructure in a secure and scalable way – giving rise to a new era of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
Defined in simple terms, IaaS is a mode of cloud computing that enables businesses to host their servers, virtual machines, network, storage, and other critical IT infrastructure components on cloud using a pay-as-you-go model. This provides you the security, stability, and flexibility to scale your IT resources up and down depending on your business needs, reducing the exorbitant up-front costs, time, and complexities involved in setting up and maintaining on-premises infrastructure. It is, therefore, little surprise that IT decision makers rank IaaS as one of the top five most impactful technologies for organisations over the coming 12-24 months, with 38% of them expected to expand their IaaS capabilities.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service Use Cases
With its flexible and cost-effective provision of general-purpose processing and computing resources, IaaS has a wide range of use cases that can be tailored to fulfil your business needs and strategic priorities. Prominent examples include:
Top 3 Benefits of Adopting Infrastructure-as-a-Service
With three out of four organisations looking to increase their technology spend in 2024, adopting IaaS solutions could go a long way in keeping your business-critical systems up and running on cloud, increasing the agility and operational efficiency of your teams, and accelerating the performance and scalability of your digital applications – thereby maximising your technology ROI.
Listed below are some of the key benefits of IaaS.
1. Cost Reduction and the Flexibility to Pay-As-You-Go
Purchasing, installing, and maintaining all the hardware required to support the day-to-day functioning of even a small to mid-sized business can involve significant up-front capital expenses and recurring costs, let alone for an enterprise-scale organisation. IaaS offers a far more flexible and cost-effective alternative, as you don’t require any up-front installation costs. You are only paying for the computational power and infrastructure resources you need, billed by your IaaS provider on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis, providing you with the flexibility of ramping up and down as your business and project needs evolve.
Should any issues arise in your cloud computing ecosystem, your IaaS provider will have dedicated professionals to resolve them and ensure that your infrastructure is being properly maintained and updated regularly. On top of being cost-effective, this also saves the precious time and capacity of your in-house IT employees, enabling them to focus on other strategic priorities and value-adding activities that drive positive business outcomes.
2. Increased Scalability, Stability, and Performance of Your Applications
Leveraging the geographically distributed data centres of market-leading IaaS providers, you can quickly scale up your applications in several locations across the globe and bring them closer to your target customers, thereby reducing your time to market. This is difficult to achieve in a self-owned hardware-based computing environment due to your limited server capacity and geographical footprint.
IaaS solutions can speed up your application development and testing lifecycles and enable you to access additional IT resources in a matter of minutes, thereby helping you scale quickly, reduce latency, and enhance overall application performance and resilience. This is particularly essential in managing your mission-critical workloads as IaaS offers significantly more stability, reliability, and supportability when compared to on-premises systems. It is also easier to leverage the round-the-clock service of your IaaS provider if you need to integrate new hardware and software (including advanced AI/ML and big data capabilities), troubleshoot issues, or wish to change your infrastructure altogether – rather than owning the entire configuration and change management process yourself. Simply put, your cloud service provider quickly and conveniently delivers what might takes ages for you to complete within your on-premises environment.
3. Stronger Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity
With the increase of data breaches and cyber-attacks, security is at the forefront of most CTO and CIO agendas, and rightfully so. IaaS typically offers a higher degree of uptime and a broader range of disaster recovery mechanisms than on-premises deployments, as they have redundancy built in at every layer and no single point of failure. This means that if one component of the cloud infrastructure ecosystem malfunctions, the remaining components of the service can still operate as they would under normal circumstances, thereby minimising the overall disruption to your business activities.
Offering multiple fault domains and scattered across geographically distributed locations, IaaS providers set up reliable and highly mature environments for the efficient replacement and upgradation of virtual machines and other computing resources. They also enable you to sync data backups automatically and on a frequent basis so that you are not running helter-skelter during contingencies. The provision of next-gen firewalls and effective network segmentation also go a long way in minimising system vulnerabilities and tightening your overall IT security to combat third-party data breaches and attacks from malicious forces.
Much like other cutting-edge technologies, IaaS is not foolproof. Potential issues such as unexpected costs, data leakage, and security risks need to be ironed out. While IaaS can save you a ton of in-house resources, there is no denying that it makes you dependent on your IaaS provider to a certain extent, as you are relying on them to provide the bulk of your infrastructure resources – critical to the smooth day-to-day functioning and overall sustainability of your business. Choosing the right IaaS provider who is mission-aligned, ethical, cost-effective, and can effectively cater to your needs is key to bringing your strategic roadmap to life.
All things considered, IaaS can be an effective solution if you are looking to shift from on-premises to a more cost-effective, flexible, scalable, and secure way of hosting your IT resources on cloud. On top of uplifting your technology landscape, this would go a long way in enabling your people to spend their invaluable time and effort in doing what adds the most value, thereby ensuring that your business is highly adaptable, resilient, and future-ready to be on cloud nine.
