How to benefit from Infrastructure-as-a-Service?

Are you looking to scale your business while reducing costs and improving accessibility? Then Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) might be the solution for you! In this article, we will explain what IaaS is and explore the many benefits it can offer businesses. So read on to find out how IaaS can help you achieve your goals.

Analysts predict the IaaS market share to grow at a 28.2% CAGR, reaching USD 141.77 billion between 2021 and 2026. IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) is a cloud service where users can access computing, storage, and networking resources on demand. The user is charged based on their usage of these resources. The IaaS provider also offers additional services like billing management, logging, monitoring, storage resiliency, and security.

This model allows businesses to focus on developing their core software, as the IaaS provider is responsible for maintaining the physical infrastructure. With IaaS, businesses are able to move their on-premises or collocated data center infrastructure to public, private, or hybrid clouds. That gives companies an opportunity to become more agile and innovate faster.

Experts from the software development company Belitsoft explain how to utilize and benefit from IaaS.
 

Advantages of Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Using IaaS, a company saves time because it doesn’t need to manage infrastructure. Also, the IaaS solution helps improve operational agility and scale the applications quickly.

• Cutting the costs

In an on-premise setup, a company manages its own data centers. It is responsible for acquiring servers, storage, development software, and networking. Additionally, they must invest in physical spaces with special power and cooling systems, and hire IT experts to purchase, manage, and upgrade equipment and licenses. This process can take months.

IaaS is cost-effective as it provides resources on demand, and you only pay for the computing, storage, and networking services you use. Maintenance expenses are predictable and can be easily budgeted. A supplier can offer each resource as a separate service, which you can add to your system as required.

IaaS suppliers provide price calculators and cost management tools to simplify expense management. However, a drawback of IaaS is that you still need to buy, install, configure, and manage operating systems, middleware, and applications.

• Improving the availability of an application

Businesses frequently need the ability to scale their apps up or down in response to changing demands. For example, eCommerce companies may experience traffic surges during the holiday season. IaaS servers allow them to address these challenges with infrastructure offered on a pay-as-you-go basis. With cloud computing services offering almost limitless resources, companies can meet all their business, legal, and compliance requirements.

IaaS providers have global content delivery networks. You can choose to scale your application in nearby locations to your customers, thus enhancing performance and decreasing network latency. It is challenging to accomplish with traditional on-premise infrastructure.

• Enhancing disaster recovery, reliability, and business continuity

IaaS eliminates the need for intensive infrastructure maintenance and hardware troubleshooting. Cloud service providers offer %99.9 server availability with service-level agreements (SLAs). Workloads can be distributed across various servers and data centers, ensuring that if one component fails, another will take over.

IaaS servers come equipped with fault-tolerance mechanisms that provide high reliability for your solutions. You can effortlessly set up automatic data backups and synchronization. With these tools, you can establish robust business continuity processes.

• Speed up innovation and feature releases for applications

IaaS simplifies product launches and upgrades by enabling you to instantly establish a dedicated development, testing, and delivery environment. Infrastructure can be set up in minutes or hours, rather than in days or weeks. It enables you to concentrate on business innovation.
 

IaaS Use Cases

Initially, companies used IaaS primarily for temporary purposes. Nowadays, we see startups, enterprises, and government organizations utilizing IaaS for various purposes, including hosting customer-facing web applications, data warehousing, analytics solutions, data storage, backup, and recovery. This solution also helps support internal applications such as ERP, supply chain, or finance. 

There are numerous scenarios where companies can apply IaaS infrastructure:

• Rapidly expandable dev and test environments

Performing development and testing activities directly in a production environment poses a significant risk of system failure. It can lead to negative consequences such as harm to a company's reputation and financial setbacks. The creation and management of these environments can present infrastructure-related challenges for DevOps teams. 

IaaS allows for the effortless creation and removal of development and quality assurance environments. That enables continuous delivery of application updates at a reduced cost.

These environments can be scaled up or down with just a few clicks. It allows a company to experiment with new ideas and promptly bring updated apps to market.

• Web Applications Hosting 

Web application hosting is a conventional and affordable use case for Infrastructure IaaS. It is suitable for a range of applications such as information websites, complex data delivery web systems, and mobile app backends.

• High-performance computing 

High-performance computing (HPC IaaS solutions) is vital for intricate modeling and prediction tasks like simulating vehicle engineering, risk modeling in finance, and generating insights in genomics and clinical trials.

• Fast-scaling storage and computing power for big data analytics

Analyzing a large volume of data to uncover patterns and relationships requires significant backend processing power. IaaS provides a solution by allowing for the storage of large volumes of data and its processing.

• Streamlining backup and recovery system planning and management

Traditional storage management can be complex and costly. Also, it requires trained staff to comply with legal and regulatory mandates. IaaS offers data backup and recovery capabilities that are superior to traditional methods. For instance, the cloud provides off-site backup options in case of a primary data center disaster.
 

In Conclusion

Businesses that encounter certain difficulties can benefit from adopting IaaS. These challenges may include limited support from current infrastructure to accommodate rapid business growth; inability to frequently upgrade on-premises infrastructure; costly infrastructure purchases that are underutilized; infrastructure constraints that decrease application performance; consistent on-premises storage resource overload; unpredictable user traffic spikes that cause frequent application crashes; on-premises applications that have slow response times.