The proliferation of on-demand cloud services represents one of the most significant technological advances of recent times. Businesses and organisations can now access highly specialised software and hardware remotely while paying a recurring subscription fee that is a fraction of the cost of bringing that same infrastructure in-house. Infrastructure as a service is a hot trend in cloud computing right now, offering enhanced performance, better security, and a high degree of scalability and support over equivalently-priced local infrastructure.
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Improved performance at a lower cost
One of the most prominent benefits of IaaS over local hardware for businesses is the enhanced performance despite the lower cost. Under the IaaS model, a business’s infrastructure is provided and maintained by a cloud service provider. The provider shoulders the costs of setting up the infrastructure and takes responsibility for ensuring it is well-maintained and always available.
Businesses can expect better performance from cloud-based infrastructure because providers can achieve a more reliable and robust setup in a data centre than would be possible in an office environment. They will also have redundancies in place to ensure they maximise their uptime and avoid service interruptions.
Not only are the upfront costs of IaaS virtually non-existent compared to buying, installing, and maintaining hardware locally, but the ongoing capital expenditure is much lower. Most cloud service providers agree to provide a certain performance level as defined in their Service Level Agreement.
Better security
Security should always be a primary concern within any IT environment. Even relatively minor lapses in security policies can open the door to devastating attacks on corporate networks. Unfortunately, robust cybersecurity and adherence to best practices throughout businesses is still something of a rarity, despite widespread coverage of damaging data leaks and ransomware attacks from around the world.
A key benefit of using cloud service providers is that they will be responsible for ensuring the security of their systems. To remain competitive and protect their reputation, service providers need to have watertight security. It isn’t just their systems and data that are at risk, but their clients’ as well. This is excellent motivation for them to invest in cybersecurity in a way that most businesses aren’t willing to do.
IaaS providers also deploy end to end encryption and other security measures to protect the security and integrity of their client data. This means businesses often enjoy better information security measures with cloud services than they could achieve in-house.
Improved scalability and flexibility
When a business invests in physical hardware, they are stuck with that hardware until they invest in something better; under this model, it makes more sense for businesses to purchase more powerful hardware than they need, so they don’t have to worry about upgrades a while. On the other hand, cloud services can easily scale to match the current needs of their users. Some services can even scale up and down on the fly in real-time.
For example, if your business is preparing to launch a national marketing campaign, you might be expecting an imminent but temporary spike in your website traffic volume that could overwhelm your hosting infrastructure. With IaaS, you can scale up the number of resources available to your website until the spike has passed and your traffic volume settles back down. This scaling is often automatic; there’s no need for you to oversee the process.
As your business grows, purchasing new equipment and hardware for every location will quickly become overwhelmingly expensive. But with IaaS, all you need to do is hook up your new location to the internet and add it to your account. The costs are negligible compared to purchasing and installing new hardware every time.
Infrastructure as a service is the latest frontier in cloud services for businesses. What we’ve listed above are just some of the key benefits your business can enjoy by investing in IaaS.
