Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet. IaaS is one of the three main categories of cloud computing services, alongside software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).
These services are increasingly policy-driven, enabling IaaS users to implement greater levels of automation and orchestration for important infrastructure tasks.
The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications.
The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components.
PRO IT provides policy-based services and is responsible for housing, operating and maintaining the equipment it provides for a client. Clients usually pay on a per-use or utility computing basis. IaaS means businesses no longer need to over-provision or overspend on their IT systems to cope with peaks in demand. Rather, they can scale up or down their use of IaaS as demand for compute power increases and decreases.
IaaS can offer many benefits to enterprise customers to create cost effective and easily scalable IT solutions where the complexities and expenses of managing the underlying hardware are outsourced to the cloud provider.
There are particular benefits where the scale of operations fluctuates, or where a business is looking to expand, as they can tap into the cloud resource as and when they need it rather than purchase, install and integrate hardware themselves.
