Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is one of the three cornerstones of the cloud computing services model. The other two are software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).
IaaS is a provisioning model in which an organisation outsources the equipment used to support its operations, including data storage facilities, hardware, servers and networking components.
Described as a new deployment paradigm for IT departments, the IaaS model prescribes that the service provider - not the client - owns this equipment and is responsible for housing, running, supporting and maintaining it.
Whether or not to use an IaaS provider is one of the decisions company executives are increasingly called on to make. Should the organisation purchase computer hardware - and install and maintain it in an in-house data centre - or use a service provider's IT infrastructure and pay for it on the basis of the amount of resources allocated and consumed?
Power to the people
With costs linked to the support, maintenance and security of company-owned hardware resources on the rise, a compelling business case can be made for IaaS, which can bring vast computing power, previously available only to governments and large corporations, to smaller organisations. What's more, CPU, memory, storage configurations and other resources can be dynamically chosen and cost-effectively scaled to meet future needs.
In addition to the IT department, IaaS offers savings to other corporate departments, having strong influences in the human resources and facilities management arenas too.
For example, IaaS requires less in-house IT expertise, so companies with an IaaS platform will be able to free up time for their employees to focus on delivering IT improvements to the business, rather than concerning themselves with day-to-day data centre management.
Global industry watchers are predicting a wholesale migration to IaaS.
Having outsourced data centre functions, companies will be able to enjoy reduced electricity and maintenance costs. The space saving realised by downsizing or even doing away with the data centre can be rented out or used for revenue generation.
Based on these issues, many global industry watchers are predicting a wholesale migration to IaaS within the next two to three years. Will South African companies follow this trend?
In South Africa, until recently, forecast implementation levels for IaaS were low, mainly because of the high costs and poor services associated with broadband connectivity. However, the landscape is changing rapidly, with the South African government encouraging the building of nationwide, fibre-optic cable networks and the lowering of high-speed broadband prices.
A state-owned company has been tasked with the sale, at reasonable rates, of high-capacity long-distance transmission services to a range of value-added network service providers, including cloud-based IaaS providers.
IaaS precautions
No discussion on IaaS is complete without addressing security concerns.
One of the hurdles that will have to be overcome for IaaS to become all-pervasive is the perception that cloud-based services present certain risks.
The key to mitigate these risks is to evaluate potential service providers carefully before signing any contracts.
The first challenge relates to performance. Should one or more large customers monopolise the system of an IaaS provider, it may well impact negatively on the smaller organisations in its client portfolio. A server could be overwhelmed with traffic, for instance, taking other virtual instances down with it.
Data security is another matter. Often, IaaS providers use shared databases, with only a single field separating various clients' data. The risk is that data might be intermingled and security breached as a consequence.
Before committing to an IaaS provider, it's critical to understand how virtual servers are deployed across the provider's infrastructure. Ensure that each server instance is limited to a single business process. One solution is to perform regular data backups using completely separate facilities - or even those of a separate IaaS provider.
Fortunately, as cloud technology matures, so professional, credible IaaS providers are coming to the fore, offering dedicated resources, often guaranteeing high levels of security, and identifying the locations of their resources that can be physically inspected.
Looking to the future, increasing adoptions of IaaS platforms will fuel the continued rise of the other elements in the cloud computing services model, notably PaaS.
PaaS is a service delivery model that allows users to rent virtualised servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones.
PaaS is a product of SaaS, the software distribution model in which hosted software applications are made available to customers over the Internet.
Increasingly, there will be an integration of PaaS and IaaS systems in the short term. It's a trend that's already evident and characterised by an increasing number of cloud players adding platform-orientated 'services' to IaaS, thus blurring the distinction between the two.
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