4 Business Benefits of Infrastructure as a Service

Nowadays Business are looking for ways in which they can save money and simplify their IT infrastructures. Technology in business has very important over the last couple of decades; but if a business isn’t using the right tech, they might be spending more than they need to. We spoke to an IT support provider London businesses have been partnering with for more than a decade, and the example they gave to illustrate the benefit of technology in business was Infrastructure as a Service.

Thanks to the Cloud, businesses can access cutting edge technology and save money on how they setup and run their infrastructure. Let’s look at Infrastructure as a Service as an example:

What is Infrastructure as a Service?

Frequently referred to as ‘IaaS’, Infrastructure as a Service is a technology solution that makes it easy for businesses to digitally transform. Public cloud providers offer Infrastructure as a Service so that businesses can host their data and applications in a cloud environment, without them having to build their own cloud.

The Cloud

As mentioned above, Infrastructure as a Service relies on the Cloud. Public cloud providers, such as Microsoft (with their service, Microsoft Azure) run their own large-scale datacenters in order to provide a large public cloud, with enough resources to support all of their customers. These resources include storage, compute, networking, etc. A simple way of looking at it is that cloud providers rent out virtual servers – and the customers renting the servers can do almost anything with them.

IaaS

With Infrastructure as a Service, customers (i.e. a business paying a public cloud provider for access to their resources) is responsible for configuring the virtual servers and machines on the cloud, but the provider is responsible for managing the underlying hardware and infrastructure. Often, businesses go through third-party companies to get access to IaaS, and to get help with setting it up. For example, the managed IT services London businesses favors often include cloud support and services.

Many different kinds of businesses could benefit from IaaS – having the right support can go a long way in making these benefits even greater. Say for example you need IT Support for Financial Services for your business, making sure your provider understands how to work with software like IaaS is a big plus.

Benefits of Infrastructure as a Service

With Infrastructure as a Service, businesses can migrate all of their data, workloads, and applications to the cloud, which has a great many benefits – some examples of how it benefits businesses are below:

1. Efficient Support

As we mentioned earlier, many businesses get access to Infrastructure as a Service through their IT support / managed service provider. A benefit of this is that it makes it much easier for an organization’s IT partner to deliver support their systems, because it is all in the cloud, and can be accessed from anywhere with the right permissions.

2. Scalability

Public cloud providers have more than enough resources to support all of their customers (for leading providers, like Microsoft, they number in the hundreds of thousands), and so organizations can very easily scale up the amount of resources they are consuming if the demand within the company increases. With the Cloud, you pay for what you use, so you can simply increase the usage and your bill will be adjusted accordingly.

3. Performance

The large-scale datacenters that cloud providers use to keep their cloud running are very robust and redundant, and they usually include cutting edge technology – because it is in the provider’s best interest to ensure their service offers the best technology performance in the market. Customers reap the benefits of this investment by getting access to reliable, high-quality performance without the time and monetary investment needed to build that type of hardware infrastructure.

4. Security

All the leading cloud providers businesses partner with make serious investments in the information security of their infrastructure, so as to ensure that their customer’s data that resides on the infrastructure is as secure as can be. Infrastructure as a Service usually includes features lie end-to-end encryption, and encryption for data in transit and at rest – but to get a full picture of the security measures a cloud provider offers, it is best to ask them directly.