Datasmith talks a lot about IaaS, Infrastructure As A Service, on our blog, social media sites, and with our clients. IaaS is the future of infrastructure. But what is IaaS and how does it work for business? This post is designed to provide an easy to understand definition of IaaS and how it works.

To begin you need to understand the term infrastructure. As defined by Webster, infrastructure is the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g., buildings, roads, and power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. In IT terms this is the servers and hardware needed to support your organization’s digital operations. It is everything needed to store and operate your software, files, data, internet, drives, etc.

Infrastructure As A Service is one of the top 3 cloud computing services, with PaaS (Platform As A Service) and SaaS (Software As A Service) being the other top services. IaaS essentially removes the physical hardware from your business. You partner with a provider who creates a virtual environment for your business. This provider is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the servers, hardware, storage, etc. needed to support your Infrastructure. They are your infrastructure “host.”

IaaS is different from Infrastructure because it is highly scalable. This means you can grow and shrink your infrastructure in minutes with IaaS, you do not have to physically add or remove hardware to do so. It eliminates many administrative tasks for your organization and allows for desktop virtualization. IaaS is also typically billed by usage, which means you pay for exactly what you use. It also reduces the amount of upgrade costs and fees since your provider is responsible for the upkeep of the physical servers and hardware.

This graphic below, courtesy of Kevin Fielder, simply explains what IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS are used for. If you are looking to update a server or enhance your infrastructure, contact Datasmith. We can evaluate your options for IaaS and other cloud based solutions.

iaas-explained

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