If you don’t want to operate a costly on-site data center, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS for short, offers the right alternative in the cloud. In addition to significantly reducing investment requirements and maintenance costs, IaaS’ scalable services also stand out for their ability to adapt to the future.
The prospects for IaaaS providers are good: In the current year alone, companies are planning to invest around 1.4 billion euros in corresponding solutions. This corresponds to an increase of 30 percent compared to the previous year. In addition, the IaaaS market is growing somewhat faster than the global business.
IaaS is basically a virtual data center in the cloud. It provides the common components of a traditional IT infrastructure. These include servers, computing capacity, storage space, file systems, backup and restore, and network resources. The respective provider provides provisioning, maintenance, and access through private or public networks – the largest providers in this segment are also called hyperscalers.
On the provider side, hypervisors such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V are typically used to distribute existing resources to customers through virtual machines. Software such as Open Stack or Apache CloudStack provides the orchestration. But there are also other approaches, such as the exclusive provision of hardware resources, container-based models or serverless computing.
IaaS: Advantages in day-to-day business
An important advantage of IaaaS architectures is their rapid scalability in combination with usage-related billing. Availability is often precisely defined by service level agreements (SLAs). This allows customers to flexibly access high-performance platforms without having to invest heavily in infrastructure construction and maintenance. All they have to do is install and maintain the applications they use. This alternative to traditional data centers is of special economic interest to small and medium businesses.
Depending on individual needs, there are different variants of IaaaS available. For example, the private and public version, which provides access to resources through the public Internet. On the other hand, companies that require a higher degree of security often use a private variant: applications are hosted in the company’s own data center without the need for an external partner.
Specialized departments can organize the necessary services directly with the IT department. Since data and applications do not leave the enterprise, a high level of security is possible with this approach. Public and private concepts can also be combined as hybrid variants. The combination of scalable cloud resources and local storage of sensitive data combines the advantages of both worlds.
IaaS Possible deployment scenario
Basically, IaaS architectures offer an extremely flexible platform for a variety of applications. They are particularly suitable for deployment scenarios that have a very fluctuating demand for computing power or storage capacity. The same applies to fast-growing companies, which using the scalable design of IaaaS offerings can easily adjust performance and storage reserves as needed.
According to the ISG study, IaaS providers are increasingly expanding their range of functions, and modern processes such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Identity Access Management (IAM) and encryption and security solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI) or even neural networks are also finding their way into this segment.
Looking to the future of IaaS
According to market researchers, companies are increasingly moving business-critical applications to the cloud. The IaaaS enterprise market is dominated by the demand for secure and regionally available infrastructure solutions. There are also differences: medium-sized customers especially value suppliers with local resources, while large enterprises tend to focus on a wide range of functions,
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