The last thing an organization leader wants to worry about when improving processes is whether the infrastructure can keep up with the need to innovate and respond to competitive pressures. IaaS has emerged as a solution in many ways.
Benefits of IaaS
Here we provide some sample use cases as they relate to realizing the potential benefit of adopting cloud IaaS.
- Business Agility
Business agility is the ability to provision and de-provision resources in lesser time, enabling the infrastructure size to match demand. For example, it can be used to support an e-commerce website which is in need of reacting to various types of demand loads every day. It can also be used to support the test and development that occurs on a non-predictable basis.
- Cost Reduction
Cost reduction can be done in multiple ways. It can be done by provisioning workloads on an as-needed basis, eliminating the need to purchase or lease hardware, or automatically provisioning them to eliminate manual intervention and labor costs. Cost can also be reduced by moving from capex to an opex model, providing a consumption based approach to IT rather than paying off IT hardware over a three-year period with greater chance of obsolescence during the term.
For example, it can be used to support test and development cycles that are measured in weeks, or to support e-commerce websites for shopping periods or online gaming.
- Local Presence
Local presence is the ability to provision infrastructure in a geographic presence where clients do not have IT operations and to achieve compliance with local country regulations in respect to data sovereignty. For example, to provision IT infrastructure in new regions.
- Rigid Elasticity
It can be said to be the ability to automatically scale due to unexpected events. Every enterprise has some kind of disaster recovery plan, but the technology behind them is usually very expensive. IaaS provides a consolidated disaster recovery infrastructure, reducing costs and increasing manageability.
- Focus on business growth
Time, money and energy spent making technology decisions and hiring staff to manage and maintain the technology infrastructure is the time which is not spent on business growth. When the infrastructure is moved to a service based model, organizations are able to focus their time and resources where they belong, on developing innovations in applications and solutions.
As described above, Cloud IaaS has the potential to reduce infrastructure costs and provide virtually limitless scalability and agility, and accelerate time to market. It can prove to be a great asset for any organization, if used appropriately.
